I think you missed something. Or maybe I wasn't clear enough.
eCommerce would work exactly like you described, the only difference
being instead of configuring a catalog or store to use a stylesheet, you
configure it to use a theme. User selected themes aren't used in eCommerce.
On the back office side, the user can select a theme and it is persisted
in user settings.
Both eCommerce and the back office apps would share common theme
selection code. What they do with the themes is what's different.
Thinking about it more, it would be better to specify themes in
eCommerce instead of specifying stylesheets - since a theme might
require more than a stylesheet change.
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
It depends on the requirements and what we want to design for each thing.
For ecommerce the common requirement is to let the people running the
store decide what it will look like, with possibly different L&F for
different sets of products (ie different catalogs).
Would (does?) anyone really want user selectable styling for ecommerce?
On the backend it's different altogether. Those are the tools employees,
contractors, etc use on a regular basis and it might be nice to allow
them to change certain colors, fonts, etc... just like you would do with
your desktop and various applications on it.
Different requirements, different implementations and tools.
-David
On Jul 11, 2008, at 10:58 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Agreed. But do we want duplicate implementations?
Maybe we can come up with a framework implementation that eCommerce
builds on. Let's say the framework has a system of selecting themes.
Then in eCommerce, instead of specifying a stylesheet in the
ProdCatalog, you could specify a theme. The framework theme-handling
code would then use the appropriate style sheet.
What do you think?
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
The ProdCatalog thingy is really only for the ecommerce site. For
manager application styling and preferences it would be serious hack...
-David
On Jul 11, 2008, at 9:58 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
Well, the system we implemented here is set up with an XML file that
has a selection of themes and where their files can be found. The
XML file is also used to present the user with a menu of styles to
choose from. Their selection is kept in user preferences.
I like your idea better though. Maybe the user preference could
contain the primary key of a ProdCatalog record. The new MyPage
component could have an area that displays all ProdCatalog records
for the user to choose from.
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
Good question/point.... We're mainly just looking at skinning the
ecommerce application, ie the OOTB templates.
Something similar for the internal apps would be interesting... are
you thinking of something like a personal preference? For that we
could do something like specify or upload your own stylesheet (that
would override any styles desired in the default one), or perhaps
even get fancier and allow people to specify certain things that
would go into a dynamically generated stylesheet of some sort to
override the main stylesheet...
-David
On Jul 11, 2008, at 9:47 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
David,
That's great news! Will there also be a way to select the theme
for the back office applications?
-Adrian
David E Jones wrote:
This is really much easier than it seems, and actually a couple
of weeks ago I got a couple of people at Hotwax started working
on some themes and some HTML/CSS enhancements to make the
skinning more flexible.
The plan we're thinking of is to use the existing the ProdCatalog
stylesheet field to change the stylesheet, and possible extend
that to support multiple stylesheets. With this approach all you
have to do to add a theme is add a hot-deploy component that
contains your CSS and image files in a webapp, and some data file
with the ProdCatalog records that would probably be the same as
the main demo ProdCatalog and be attached to the same store and
categories, but with a different stylesheet. In this way you
could also have different sets of products though, which would
allow you to easily do some cool demo catalogs/sites for
different sets and types of products.
-David
On Jul 11, 2008, at 9:20 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:
At the last developers conference, I had suggested to David
Jones that we have a "CSS Style Sheet Shootout" - where
different OFBiz developers could submit their themes to Jira and
we could vote on them. The one with the most votes would get
committed to the project. At the time there was too much
embedded styling in the project - so it wouldn't work and,
consequently, nothing was done. Things are different now and
changing the style of the whole project is easier. So, I'm in
agreement with that aspect of this thread.
Where I have a problem with this thread has already been
mentioned - having multiple themes in the trunk will become a
support nightmare. My preference would be to have the
*capability* to switch themes built into the framework, but only
have one theme in the trunk. Anyone wanting to supply additional
themes could do so on their own. It could even develop into a
cottage industry.
-Adrian
Ashish Vijaywargiya wrote:
+1
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 4:21 AM, Jacques Le Roux <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bruno, Ashish,
Having them in separated directories, why not introduce a
property in
general.properties file (or somewhere else) to select the
theme at will,
default being the one we use currently ?
Jacques
From: "Bruno Busco" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Ashish,
thank you for your comments.
Well, of course if the themes are taken from the gallery
there should be a
information on the theme that tells you with which release of
Ofbiz it can
be used (now we could go with the SVN rev until we have the
next release).
For the file overwritting we could think to have the theme in
a special
folder (this is how many CMS do, for example Drupal).
So for example we could have:
/framework/images/webapp/images/themes/theme1/maincss.css
/framework/images/webapp/images/themes/theme2/maincss.css
the themesX folder should never be committed. And then have a
UI that let
us
specify which theme between the availables must be used
(this, as
suggested,
could be in the user preferences).
-Bruno
2008/7/11 Ashish Vijaywargiya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Sorry for writing again on this.
But I see a loopwhole in this.
Suppose you are creating new maincss.css file.
Someone has downloaded your file and kept your file in
images directory
and
removes the old one.
Now if user take update of Ofbiz on regular basis or we can
say after
certain duration of time.
And if someone introduce a new class in Stylesheet file and
uses it
extensively in some section so in this
case your file(maincss.css created by you) might not be
having those new
classes entries.
So the layout will not be consistent.
What do you think about it Bruno ?
--
Ashish
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 1:49 AM, Ashish Vijaywargiya <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bruno,
I like your idea.
--
Ashish
On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 1:37 AM, Bruno Busco
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
Hi devs,
I am writing a new maincss.css file and I will submit when
finished.
I think that several other users/developers will write (or
have
already)
their .css files.
Since the graphical theme is something very subjective it
will be
difficult
to agree with a unique theme and have it committed on SVN.
So I propose to open a OFBiz Theme Gallery on confluence
where all
users
can
upload their own theme with a little screenshot.
All users could then browse the available theme, download
it and copy
on
their ofbiz installation.
The standard theme format to uploaded could be a folder
that contains
the
maincss.css file and relative gif files.
What do you think about?
Many thanks,
Bruno