Re: OFBiz themes gallery on Confluence

[Anil Patel]

Adrian,



Regards
Anil Patel

Should we instead consider integrating portal server (apache Pluto) into Ofbiz and use its rich UI features instead of developing our own stuff? On Jul 14, 2008, at 11:31 AM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

-David

I don't know if we'll actually do anything like that, and our efforts are of a secondary priority for us right now anyway. If you'd like to work on this for your own needs, or for the fun of it or whatever is motivating your interest, then go for it! On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 07:14:48 -0700 (PDT), Adrian Crum <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote:

Exactly.


anything going on in your project.

-Adrian


--- On Sun, 7/13/08, David E Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Let me know if there is anything I can do to help. I don't want to overlap

From: David E Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: OFBiz themes gallery on Confluence
To: dev@ofbiz.apache.org
Date: Sunday, July 13, 2008, 11:43 PM
You're right Adrian, I think I did miss what you were
getting at.

Are you imagining a new entity called "Theme", or
perhaps something
more specific like "VisualTheme" or some name
like that? This entity
would have one or more stylesheet locations associated with
it, and
perhaps other information. The theme IDs would be referred
to in the
ProdCatalog entity, and in one or more user preference
records as well.

Something along those lines?

-David



On Jul 11, 2008, at 11:20 AM, Adrian Crum wrote:

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

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