How do I create custom skins for my Doctum courses?
Doctum comes preloaded with a selection of great skins to help get you started in building customized training materials. That said, you may want to build courses with a completely custom look and feel. Perhaps you have certain branding standards you need to uphold or maybe you have some preexisting training that you are trying to replicate in look and feel.
Doctum does support the ability to add custom skins to your courses. When you add skins to the system they are available to you and only you and your users. To do so, simply log into your account and visit the "Manage Content -> Skins" tab in the Course Builder environment. Once there, click the "New Skin" link and you will be greeted with a page that looks like this:
Wow, that's a lot of inputs, right? Let's take a look at what each of them is for and what you need to do to produce them.
Name - This is the name which your skin will use on the project setup screen.
Description - This is the description which your skin will use on the project setup screen.
Thumbnail - This is the thumbnail graphic which will represent your skin on the project setup screen.
File - This file must be a compiled SWF file, created using the Flex Component Skin kit, and then integrated with the custom Doctum skin CSS styles, available here. After that is done, the file must be compiled in Adobe Flex. You can learn more about this here. We're working on making this part of the process easier, but if you need further assistance to complete this part, please email us at support@doctumlearning.com. We'd love to help you get your custom art placed in your course!
Text CSS - The body copy and other elements in the content area of your skin can be styled completely independently of the other elements of your skin. This CSS file does NOT need to be compiled and is much more similiar to standard HTML CSS. You can download a sample of that file here.
Video Skin - If you plan to use Video in your course, you may want to skin the player components, too! If you know how to do this already, great! In order to learn how to do this, you'll want to look here.
Alternate Video Skin - Your downloaded EXE version of the course requires a separate video player skin that doesn't allow full screen playback. This is due to security limitations in the compiler we use to create Doctum.