Create a skin from scratch without a parent

[fv]

What are your thoughts on creating a new skin from scratch without it depending on a parent theme?

We are thinking about this in terms of fully understanding our Sass-Codebase and being able to minimise the file size of our CSS. I am fairly new to Lithium, but from what I saw until now is that people use "Responsive Peak" and then overwrite the already written Sass code. From a developer standpoint this is not the way you should develop websites.

Has anyone done this before? Would you recommend this? What were your learnings?

[ClaudiusH]

Hi @fv and welcome to the Lithium Community,

You are right in that overwriting CSS definitions is not the ideal way to do. Luckily the SASS file structure allow you to overwrite in a way that you are not bloating the output definitions, but only the latest definition from your skin will actually make it through.

Theoretically you could start from scratch, but it would be cumbersome and potentially prolonging your deployment times as it's quite tricky to work out from the unstyled structure how page elements might be intended to be positioned.

[thinkclay]

How does one go about creating a parent skin? I am interested in creating a "from scratch" skin and would rather start with a blank slate all across the board. The most minimal I've been able to get down to for a child skin still inherits responsive_peak skin properties. 

Additionally, it would be really nice to remove all of the Responsive layout markup. These extra divs (lia columns, rows, etc) get in the way of development in areas where one might want to break the mold of what a page could/should look like. I've resolved to using just a single column layout with only one region defined, but I would love to be able to remove ALL (or as much as possible) of the markup/styles that Khoros skins impose out of the box. Is this doable and how?