Tutorials XML Skin

The XML skin is a little used feature of IP.Board that renders a standard forum page as XML content instead of as a more commonly accessed HTML page of data. The purpose of this skin is to present the useful data of the page in a common format, so that you can grab just the data you need for whatever purpose you have. There isn't any visible link to these XML pages, but they can be accessed by accessing the proper URL.

Note that you probably will not ever need to access these pages unless you are developing something to pull data from a Tutorials installation, either your own or someone else's. Because of this, this topic is something a lot of people won't need, but those who do need it will benefit greatly from being able to have access to this information.

The XML skin for Tutorials was added in Tutorials 1.2.1. As of the current official version, the following pages have XML skin versions:

• Main application page: http://domain.com/xm...p?app=tutorials
• Individual category page: http://domain.com/xm...tutorials&cat=1
• Individual article page: http://domain.com/xm...ials&article=49
• List of attachments for a tutorial: http://domain.com/xm...tachments&id=47
• Pending tutorials page: http://domain.com/xm...section=pending
• Advanced Statistics page: http://domain.com/xm...y&section=stats
• All Comments page: http://domain.com/xm...ection=comments

To pull data from these pages will vary depending on what you're using to access the page. But the basic concept is that you write code to pull the output from the specific page, then use an XML parser to parse that content. Each page then has its own unique XML structure that holds the data for that page, which you then need to use your XML parser to dig through to pull out the data you need.