Hey everyone.

Well it's been a busy couple of weeks for me and I have sort of disappeared amongst the work I have been doing.

Firstly, Open Live has been doing pretty well and it looks like a lot of people are taking advantage of the ease of use. I have received a lot of positive feedback and thank all those that have had input into the project.

But now its time to move onto the future. The first thing is as you may or may not have noticed already is that Open Live will soon be getting a port over to Windows Live Messenger 9.0 beta. This means that skins will be able to support 9.0 beta a bit easier than what it is now.

This port has been created by Nile and features a few improvements that were created specifically for 9. The good news is that since Microsoft announced that 9 was going to close its beta phase until later on in the year it means that Open Live 9 will have a pretty long life (well for a beta resource anyway)

Now onto the next thing.

As you guys and girls know the skinning contest is coming our way and is going to be one of the biggest events to hit this community this year. It will give skin makers the chance to show off their work and compete to be the best.

For those wondering no I am not entering the contest as it has already been agreed by myself and Patchou that I would not to make things fairer and interesting.

Anyway this is where the exciting news comes in.

I have started up a wiki website for everyone to use during the progress of the contest. This website will be your one stop skinning resource with articles on how to get the best of Open Live as well as several references such as UIFile purposes (yes including stuff for WLM 9 Beta as well) Work has already begun and there are a few articles online now (but not many). Anyway this is where I need a bit of help. I am putting out the call for people who want to help out with the wiki's creation by being contributors.

The documentation is a pretty big process so I know that if I try to tackle it all by myself you won't be seeing any new skin releases from me in a long time. My plan is to start a section on the wiki which has a whole bunch of tutorials using Open Live to create them. With these I am hoping that skinning will reach a new level of popularity and we will begin to see everyones work grow and mature a bit.

But yeah there will plenty of information up by the time the contest does indeed start so be on the lookout. For those who are interested in becoming a contributor just reply to this thread. Keep in mind that it would be good to also get stuff on Messenger as well (i.e the history of Messenger, Messenger Plus! etc) so yeah it won't all just be about skinning.

If the wiki gets enough support I might look into also getting the site translated for other languages (if enough translators are interested that is)

Anyway yeah thats about it for now.

Willz.

Great idea Willz. This is definitely going to make skinning popular. I would like to help but I don't know how is it going to be done. I will help if I see that I can. Will you post any more information for people who want to contribute?

For now I'm just seeing how much interest there is in it, posting up stuff is easy since its a wiki. But yeah for now just want to see who would be willing to help out. Once I have a list of those who want to help I will pass out the details.

I already have things such as cmdid tables going so its starting to take shape slowly.

I can help.

On a similar note, once it's out to those people, if anybody notices anything strange they can contact me about it as well and I can look into certain things (like banning abusers and what not).

Any work left to help with? Feel free to add me to the contributors list

yeah theres still plenty to be added so theres gonna be something to help out with for a while. Later this week ill pass on some details.

I would love to help, but i cant really. Dont know much at all about skinning.... But i can give it a go if you really need people.

Ok this is the stuff that I want to get happening at the moment:

FAQ Page (Using / Installing Skins / Quick Info) - This is so that we can direct people to this page when they need help with using skins.

FAQ Page (Making skins) - This will go over what you can and can't do with skinning

Messenger History Page - History of Messenger

Messenger Plus Page - Everything related to Messenger Plus! history etc

Skins strings reference - Will be a table for string ID's that can come in handy

Broken up UIFile Pages - Each UIFile will be broken up and code snippets of places of interest will be put here

Open Live Resource Table - images used in open live will be documented

for now this is the main stuff I want to cover before I get deeper into other things such as references for layout types, element restrictions etc. I already have a couple of people helping out and its much appreciated. This should be good once its done. I'll worry about customizing the wiki once its all there

i've a question, but the link to this wiki?where is? i dont see it! O.o
i can help you to traslate the wiki in italian or french!

The wiki is not ready yet. Willz will tell us when we should begin working on it.

I could surely help translate (and it's good idea) but keep it slim.
No need to explain things twice.

* Thor doesn't have all the time in the world to translate a complete wiki

For now it looks like a standard custom wiki, but very few articles exist and link together. Willz wrote a bit of FAQ/Q&A which was ok, but more suited for a website than a wiki I felt (Just the tone of speech on there, not a major problem, makes it more 'friendly' easy to follow I guess)

I'm still pottering away at skins whenever encountering a problem I'm fixing it in Open Live Nine and the skin I'm working on, we all make mistakes sometimes though (I've still got a couple of definitions to fully translate into Open Live Nine, and the majority of images, blame Microsoft for more misleading resources and duplicates ) Willz has a great way of writing his changelogs to make his fixes seem more sophisticated/important

Yeah well the wiki is going to have more technical documents, I have been writing them..... I just haven't had the time to put them up as of yet. It will all start coming together properly this week.

A few things have starting to get linked up so I'm hoping by next week I'll have enough done to open it up to the public. At any rate the next version of Open Live 8.5 is pretty much ready to go, I'll try and help out with the 9.0 version out as well just to get things moving a bit.

and don't think I've forgotten about skins entirely, I've also been planning out 3 new designs which have no relation to movies (so skins like Ev0 and Zero-G). So things are in motion

@Nile - pssh all my changes are sophisticated and important

Here why... for the trad. no problem, i look you for the wiki is over!