The Privateer Theme includes a skinning system that can be used to completely change the look of a site with just a few mouse clicks ( and possibly a couple of option adjustments ).
Current Skin Galleries
Included Skins  Skins that are included with the Privateer Theme. |
There are three primary reasons that I added skins to the Privateer Theme even though themes are typically skins for WordPress:
1 : One Theme, Many Looks
The skins mechanism allows me to provide a large number of looks that people can easily get set up on their sites.
While there are enough options in the Privateer to make a lot of different looks, skins allow me to provide interesting looks to people that are not yet familiar with all of the themes options.
2 : Saving Existing Looks
In addition to being able to choose skins, you can use the Privateers’ built in options to create your own looks and then save them ( as a new skin ) for later use.
You can also create looks for others using this method. Simply create your look, export it as a new skin, and send it to someone else who used the Privateer.
3 : Quick Development and Support
Once you get familiar with the options within the Privateer, creating new skins is fairly quick and efficient. As I develop looks for different people, I needed a way to create a look locally, easily put the look up on a dev server for clients to look at, and provide the final look to the client.
I also wanted a relatively easy way to have clients send me their current looks so that I could make alterations and test them on my local system before sending the adjusted files back for use on live systems.
In addition to the above, one can use simple file search and replace functionality on the skin files to change image paths and colors before applying a skin.