Dear friends,

I want to apologize for being absent for almost 3 weeks. I moved into a new house lately and there had been several matters to take care of. September and October were months with extensive expenses and I had to accept a pile of new projects to cover those expenses. This whole situation left me literally with no social life and many sleepless nights working on various client projects.

Thankfully, I can now safely say I'm settled in my new house, though still new to Athens. Most time consuming projects are almost done as well, which means I'll finally find time to resume the development of this skin. As you probably know already, SymiSun 03 was chosen to become the next default skin for Cotonti and it will be the one "shipped" with Siena 0.7.0. Of course there is work to be done until the skin is ready for downloading.

Kort will be helping me to get familiar with SVN and other weird stuff that need to be done in order for the whole Cotonti team to track down the skin progress and follow a proper organized way of producing the final version of the skin. I wish to thank Kort in advance for taking the time to help me out with this.

On a final note, people asked me to provide them with an unfinished / demo / whatever is available version of this skin. I can understand you are impatient and you have every right to be, but I'd kindly ask you not to be. I can assure you the final version that will actually become available to the public would definitely be worth waiting for.
That's all for now.

Take care,
Stam

As it's my first time working with Cotonti, I fell in love with logical blocks the moment I realized what can be done utilizing them. Using the power of logical expressions in the .tpl files, I was able to go the extra mile and greatly improve the AI of the sed-light skin. Let me break it down for you...
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Since the initial set up of this demo installation of Cotonti (October 5th 2009), I have been working to improve this "soon to be released" skin, as it was not 100% complete before the deadline of the skin contest. Let's take a look at a day by day progress.
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Let's take a look at the built-in features of this new template:

• Super fast loading, overall size of template images being 40kb
• Cross-browser compatible, the layout remains consistent in every modern browser
• W3C standards compliant, valid xHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1
• Search Engine Friendly, using HTML tags in proper places and order
• Content rich header, including User Panel, Site Info and Recent Items with appealing tabs
• Clean table-less interface with large fonts and plenty of white space
• Custom icon set, specially created for this template
• Sleek rounded buttons with no loading delay on rollover due to the sprite technique
• Modern footer with search input, important site shortcuts and link to the top of page

While the XHTML/CSS template of this design is ready, a complete skin is yet to become available.
Feel free to post your comments on how to improve the skin, including bugs you might encounted.