Phish-Skin for PHProjekt

Looking for PHProjekt 5.0 skins? Check http://www.latz.cc/phprojekt/5.0

Looking for PHProjekt 4.0 skins? Check http://www.latz.cc/phprojekt/4.0

"Software-Patents" in Europe: The threat prevails

Soon the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers will again decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called "software patents" in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as PHProjekt, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted "software patents" (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like "progress bars", "mouseclicks on online order forms", "scrolling within a window" and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the "software-patentholders" for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the self-developed software is possibly violating "software-patents", if you want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents, "software-patents" are, in the draft proposed by the commission, monopolization of business ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation.

More about the current major problem at http://nosoftwarepatents.com/

PHProjekt is a great tool to co-laborate and co-ordinate projects with a group of people. By default, PHProjekt is delivered with a rather simple yet straightforward user interface.

download and install according to the instructions Click on the thumbnails for life-size screenshots!
Default PHProjekt skin	The new Phish-Skin for PHProjekt

I took the liberty to design the skin displayed above, with a set of icons from http://www.iconarchive.com/. I added some other improvements, such as:

Help, Copyright and Logout have now corresponding text within the menu links, instead of shortcuts such as "?", "©" and ">>"
The default logo and font were changed. This can of course be customised to your preference. In the given example, Arial Narrow is the font in use.
Phish-Skin offers two different versions of the same set of icons: one set uses static icons, the other versions uses the mouseOver-effect for animated icons. See the README file for more information on how to install each version

Update 26.06.2003
PHProjekt 4.0 has been released! One of the new features is skin support. Phish-Skin is now available for PHProjekt 4.0 at http://www.latz.cc/phprojekt/.

Update 17.04.2003
PHProjekt 4.0 has been released! One of the new features is skin support. Right now, Phish-Skin does not support this feature for version 4.0, but I hope to finish a port by mid-Summer. Until then, Phish-Skin will only be usable for versions 3.2a and 3.3.
If you want to support me with this port, please contact me - artists welcome!

Update 07.11.2002
Due to the interest shown by a lot of people, I finally managed to wrap up the required files in a nice archive that you can download and install according to the instructions in the README file.

Questions
Q: What is Phish-Skin?
A: Phish-Skin is a way to change (skin) the look of the great online-colaboration tool PHProjekt. It consists of a set of icons for the different areas of PHProjekt, as well as some modifications in other files.

Q: Is Phish-Skin really for free?

Q: For what versions of PHProjekt can I use Phish-Skin?
A: Phish-Skin can currently be used with the most major recent versions of PHProjekt: version 3.2a (and up), version 4.0 (and up) and of course the latest version 5.0.

Q: Where can I download Phish-Skin, and how do I install it?
A: You can download the Phish-Skin archive for version 3.2a+ phish-skin.zip from http://www.latz.cc/phprojekt/3.3/phish-skin.zip. Installation and backup instructions can be found in the README file that is also contained in the archive.

Q: After installing Phish-Skin, my PHProjekt does not work anymore - what do I do?
A: First of all, Don't Panic. Second of all, this has never happened to me, and I have developed the skin from scratch. However, in the unlikely event that your installation will not work anymore, there is hope. If you followed the instructions in the README file, you will have security copies of your original files. Simply copy those files back in place in your PHProjekt installation, and everything should be back to normal.

Q: Does Phish-Skin work with all browsers?
A: It should work with all standard-compliant browsers. Of particular importance is the support for transparency in PNG images, which is one of the reasons why I recommend Mozilla Firefox for all your browsing needs. Microsoft Internet Explorer is not supported.

Q: Phish-Skin is quite a weird name, isn't it?
A: True. It is derived from two big inspirations for this projekt, PHP and fishies. On a side-note, I think it would be quite arrogant to just call it "the skin" - hence the name ;)

Achim J. Latz, phprojekt@latz.cc , 13.02.2021

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