Basic Beginner question to Emby Theming

[TimFromFL 5]

Based on the desire to have Emby themed in a way that my family would be more familar with, I have started to work on creating a theme. I have setup my environment based on the recommendations. I have also used this as an opprotunity to teach myself more advanced javascript and css. I spend most of my time working in ASP.Net and SharePoint environments so I am still working on getting myself accustomed to the environment and conventions being used. I'm not sure that this is something that the whole community would benefit from, but I figured someone might be able to answer my questions.

 

I have gone through and created renders of each of the screens for how I want to layout all of the assets, from there, I created hardcoded HTML pages that matched the renders, sliced each of those into parts with the appropriate div tags and got the layout exactly as I want it using the existing CSS

 

Questions

1. Just inserting the page into the directory structure does not seem to let it render. For instance, I copied the page \item\item.html and renamed it \item\item_test.html, modified the URL in the address bar and all I see is the navigation bar (Back,search, profile and time) but if I go to http://locahost/item/item_test.html it does render like I would expect. This has led me to the assumption that there are dependencies in the page that must be called properly in order to be displayed. Is this correct? The reason that I am concerned about this is because I intend to have additional screens,popups and dialogs that aren't in the default skin, but I will have to modify my plans if I am required to only use a specific set of pages
2. The initial post advertising theming only mentions using HTML, CSS and javascript to create themes. is there anything in the emby-web-defaultskin that should be left alone and not modified to prevent things breaking with updates are applied?
3. Again, since I am still trying to get my footing with this particular development environment, I am having trouble tracing how everything is being called. For instance, setting breakpoints and tracing the code I can see that tv.html and tv.js have a reference to favorites.js,genres.js,series.js,studios.js,suggestions.js and upcoming.js. Other than an string array being populated with each of the names, I don't see where they are being referenced or called. Again, my reasoning is if I wanted to add an additional tab to the interface, I trying to understand how that would fit in with everything else and how to make it work.

Thank you for your time an patience with any assistance that you can give.

 

TimFromFL

[Luke 37191]

1 - you need to declare the routes in your plugin.js file.

 

2 - no, you can change just about anything.