---
title: Creating Skins
author: 
  - Brett Porter
  - Dennis Lundberg
date: 2009-03-08
---

<!-- Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one-->
<!-- or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file-->
<!-- distributed with this work for additional information-->
<!-- regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file-->
<!-- to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the-->
<!-- "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance-->
<!-- with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at-->
<!---->
<!--   http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0-->
<!---->
<!-- Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,-->
<!-- software distributed under the License is distributed on an-->
<!-- "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY-->
<!-- KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the-->
<!-- specific language governing permissions and limitations-->
<!-- under the License.-->

# Creating Skins

If you want to tune the way your site looks, you can use a custom skin to provide your own CSS stylesheets. If that is still not enough, you can even tweak the output templates that Maven uses to generate the site documentation.

For an in-depth discussion of site customization, please have a look at [ Maven: The Complete Reference, Chapter 10\. Site Generation](http://books.sonatype.com/mvnref-book/reference/site-generation.html) provided by Sonatype.

## About

A skin contains the following elements:

- Resources to copy into each project \(such as images used by the CSS\)
- A couple of CSS files, containing the visual styling
- A Velocity template in `/META-INF/maven/site.vm` for an alternate HTML rendering of the site.
- Since Maven Site Plugin 3\.5, an optional [skin descriptor](/doxia/doxia-sitetools/doxia-skin-model/index.html) in `/META-INF/maven/skin.xml` containing meta-data about the skin
## Maven Site Skin Archetype

[`maven-archetype-site-skin` archetype](/archetypes/maven-archetype-site-skin/) can be used to easily create a complete new skin project, including its dedicated `/META-INF/maven/site.vm`.

## Building

A skin is built like any other JAR - with a `packaging` of `jar`. No additional plugins are needed.

Resources should be put in the normal `src/main/resources` directory.

Once the JAR is built and deployed, it can be used by projects.

## Constructing the CSS

<!-- @todo More information is needed here on constructing the CSS-->

If you are interested in constructing your own CSS, it is recommended that you copy the file [`maven-theme.css`](https://github.com/apache/maven-default-skin/tree/master/src/main/resources/css/maven-theme.css) from Maven Default Skin and modify it to suit your needs.

## Customizing the HTML Output with a Velocity Template

The format of the Velocity template is currently out of scope for this document.

For more information about how to write Velocity templates see the [Velocity User Guide](https://velocity.apache.org/engine/2.3/user-guide.html) and [Velocity Template Language Reference Guide](https://velocity.apache.org/engine/2.3/vtl-reference.html).

Notice that Velocity 2\.3 is used since Maven Site Plugin 4\.0\.0-M2, but version 1\.7 was used previously.

