The majority of sections in your admin panel can be used regardless of the skin you have installed but there are some features which are hook directly into our default skin, obviously these will not work on your skin unless you're willing to make modifications. If you're feeling brave and you want to edit your skin so it works flawlessly with these unique admin panel features you can find the details below...
Skin -> Artwork: Although by default our skin is setup to automatically use the locations in here you can easily get your own skin to point to these locations for the background artwork. If you click on the button in the "About" section of this web page it will list all the different folder names.
The artwork is stored in locations such as: media/branding/backgrounds/HOME_LIVE_TV/HOME_LIVE_TV_001.jpg.
If you want to hardcode your skin to use these locations then it should be in 1080i/Includes_Home.xml.
Skin -> Main Menu Items: This is a little more complicated, this section is linked to our modified skin. The main file you would need to look at is 1080i/Includes_Home.xml (based on Aeon skins, it may differ on your skin). If you want the main menus opening into the same functions you have on admin panel then you would want to search that file for this line:
RunScript(special://home/addons/plugin.program.tbs...
If the skin is told to run that command it should work. Each section has a very slightly different RunScript() command so you'd need to go through each section manually checking our code against yours.
Skin -> Upper Menu Items: These are unique to our skin and cannot easily be added to other skins. Of course if you can find the relevant code in our skin then you are welcome to try and port it to another skin.
Skin -> Sub-menus: If you have a look in yours skins skinshortcut folder you'll be able to see what id each sub-menu has. Based on Aeon Nox skins you'll find these details at:
addons/<skin_id>/shortcuts/x<number>.DATA.xml
Hopefully your skin will use the same id's for the same menus, if it does then you can use this section without any modifications required. If your skin uses different id's you can add them in this section by using the "Add a custom item" option at the bottom of the page. Alternatively you could edit the ids your skin uses for each section but this will more than likely require multiple edits across a number of xml files.
Main Menus -> Widgets: These may work but you would certainly need to check the Includes_Home.xml file in your skin to make sure it uses the same widget names as our skin.
Conclusion:
The main thing is getting your skin to load up into plugin.program.tbs when a menu item is clicked. Even if your skin has different naming conventions you should find it's possible to get the menus working from admin panel, you just need to make sure each menu item is set to call plugin.program.tbs (this is generally in Includes_Home.xml)
Let's say you wanted your Pictures menu to open into World (this is what our skin currently does). It doesn't matter what the menu name is so long as the path in the RunScript command is correct, so for this example it would be:
RunScript(special://home/addons/plugin.program.tbs/home.py,HOME_WORLD)
The naming of the paths are exactly the same as the names of the artwork folders mentioned above so you have: HOME_LIVE_TV, HOME_MUSIC, HOME_MOVIES etc.
If you feel this is all a little too complicated feel free to contact a member of the team who can get you in touch with our resident skinner. For a small fee and providing they can squeeze it into their schedule they will be more than happy to make the necessary edits to your skin.