Change the contact list background

Your skin would be pretty dull if your contact list had white background, so I'm going to show you how to change the background to a background-image.

Start off by extracting Messenger's resources. If you already have, don't bother doing this again. We need to edit a definition/style file in order to apply new styles, as the background-image isn't supported by default. So copy the 1001-definition into your skins folder (msgres_4004_1001.txt) from your extraction folder.

Open it up in a text editor of choice, and do a search for <BuddyList you will hopefully come up with this line:

<BuddyList id=atom(abView) Layout=FillLayout() 
CmdGroup=guid("{16E32D35-5350-4805-B7F0-5E782510AF6F}")/>

Then add the background property to the buddy list-tag like this. rcbkd tells Messenger to load the background from resources with the ID 59000.

<BuddyList id=atom(abView) Layout=FillLayout() 
CmdGroup=guid("{16E32D35-5350-4805-B7F0-5E782510AF6F}") background=rcbkd(59000)/>

59000 is our ID for the background image we're going to add as a resource (remember this has to be over 59000). So now open your SkinInfo file in text editor of choice, and add something like this under the <Resource>-tab:

<New>
  <Pictures>
    <Picture Id="59000">
      <File>background.png</File>
      <Metadata>
        <UMLeft>1</UMLeft>
        <UMRight>1</UMRight>
        <UMTop>1</UMTop>
        <UMBottom>1</UMBottom>
        <Colorize>true</Colorize>
      </Metadata>
    </Picture>
  </Pictures>
</New>

You will also need to replace 1001-definition with your 1001 file. Example:

<Replace>
  <Windows>
    <Definitions>
      <Definition Id="10001">
        <File>1001.txt</file>
      </Definition>
    </Definitions>
  </Windows>
</Replace>

There you go. Thanks for reading.