Shoutbox

Your skin would be pretty dull if your contact list had white background, so I'm going to show you how to change the background to a background-image.

Start off by extracting Messenger's resources. If you already have, don't bother doing this again.
We need to edit a definition/style file in order to apply new styles, as the background-image isn't supported by default. So copy the 1001-definition  into your skins folder (msgres_4004_1001.txt) from your extraction folder.

Open it up in a text editor of choice, and do a search for "<BuddyList" you will hopefully come up with this line:

code:

---

<BuddyList id=atom(abView) Layout=FillLayout() CmdGroup=guid("{16E32D35-5350-4805-B7F0-5E782510AF6F}")/>

---

Then add the background property to the buddy list-tag like this. rcbkd tells Messenger to load the background from resources with the ID 59000.

code:

---

<BuddyList id=atom(abView) Layout=FillLayout() CmdGroup=guid("{16E32D35-5350-4805-B7F0-5E782510AF6F}") background=rcbkd(59000)/>

---

59000 is our ID for the background image we're going to add as a resource (remember this has to be over 59000). So now open your SkinInfo file in text editor of choice, and add something like this under the <Resource>-tab:

code:

---

                <New>
                    <Pictures>
                        <Picture Id="59000">
                            <File>background.png</File>
                            <Metadata>
                                <UMLeft>1</UMLeft>
                                <UMRight>1</UMRight>
                                <UMTop>1</UMTop>
                                <UMBottom>1</UMBottom>
<Colorize>true</Colorize>
                            </Metadata>
                        </Picture>
                    </Pictures>
                </New>

---

Edit: You will also need to replace 1001-definition with your 1001 file. Example:

code:

---

<Replace><Windows><Definitions><Definition Id="10001"><File>1001.txt</file></Definition></Definitions></Windows></Replace>

---

There you go. Thanks for reading.