Colin Moock wrote a nice, and very thorough, article about skinning a V2 Progress Bar component. These kinds of tutorials are very much needed. Chafic has written some really good ones too.
I think the big outpoint though, is that a tutorial on how to skin a single component should not have to be as long as a tutorial on how to create a component from scratch. Take this quote from Colin’s article:
Some components require advanced skinning techniques not discussed in this article. For example, the Button component’s skin, perhaps surprisingly, is primarily code-based. Skinning a Button component requires a thorough understanding of the Button skin code.
No knock to Colin, he’s merely reporting the facts. But am I the only one who sees that as a major outpoint? It’s a button for God’s sake! It shouldn’t require a throrough understanding of ANY code to make it look a little different.
Particularly when you think of it like this: who is most likely going to want to skin components? Designers or high end developers? Or better yet, who would you want to be handling that task in your company? Is a designer going to have a thorough understanding of the Button skin code? Probably not. Is an object oriented application developer going to make a really good component skin? Possibly, in his own mind. Probably not in the mind of the designer.
Even as a fairly experienced coder, I found it was actually easier to make my own components than to try to figure out all the intricacies an idiosyncracies of styling and skinning V2 components. I’m really hoping that Macromedia takes a whole new angle on the V3 components in regards to skinning and styling.