Add-ons FAQ
Allergy can be extended with both extra plug-ins and styles. Two plug-ins (CC and Quotes) and three styles (Allergy, Allergy Blue and Allergy orange) are included in the default download package of Allergy.
Can I make my own themes?
Yes, you can! Themes, layouts, skins - well, they're called styles in Allergy but work just the same, and if you know CSS, you know how to create styles for Allergy.
How do I create a style?
The best way to get started is to use a DOM inspector tool to quickly understand how Allergy's pages are structured. Allergy prints standards-compliant XHTML code that's easy to stylize with CSS. Allergy searches for link.php in the folder of the selected style, and includes it in the <head> of each page, so you can link to as many CSS files and alternative style sheets as you wish. The easiest way to get started is to just copy an old file and alter it to link to your CSS files and give proper media info. Here's some more useful info for style developers.
- Variable $styledirectory is the working directory of the style in link.php
- Variable $styletitle is the title of your style in link.php
- Allergy's default logo image is 160 px in width.
- The maximum width and height for thumbnail images in Allergy is 130 and 100 px, respectively.
- Basically the pages you have to style are home view, album view, detailed view and the login screen for admin tool and each section in the admin area.
What about custom plug-ins?
Those are just as easy to create. Plug-ins are simply PHP scripts. index.php of each directory in the plugin folder is included in the sidebar. When using variables, please append the name of the plug-in in the beginning of each variable's name before an underline character to make sure they do not interfere with Allergy's own variables. You should use the variable $plugindirectory to link to the working directory of the plug-in.