Hans wrote: > Dave, I am having dificulty understanding your approach. > Why would a skin want its own SideBar subpage for instance? > To me a skin determines the layout and appearance, but not > content. Layout is determined by the skin template, and apearance > chiefly by css. > > Exceptions may be that a skin may also provide some functional > additions, like a search form in the sidebar, action buttons at other > places etc. The skin template and php file can take care that > such is added without the user having to edit standard PmWiki > subpages like SideBar. > > So what does a {$Site}.{$SkinName}-SideBar achieve which cannot > be done by template and css file? Whilst it would be nice to separate layout elements from content, we're not even close to that point. Practically every skin I've ported has required additional html elements in order to achieve particular visual effect. Some examples: * Blix: In order to achieve the rounded corner effect on sidebar headers, an additional html element is added. (In this case though I chose to add the html dynamically via javascript) * Header/footers: Typically changes are needed here to accommodate subsections within the header and footer. * Footer: Usually a left/middle/right subdivision. Some skins have an 'About' section in the footer, or use the footer for more content than we typically see in PmWiki (GlossyHue is an example). * Header: The addition of a header tag line. In Skidoo the addition of a history of links. * Sidebar: In Skidoo I added tabs to the sidebar, which required additional html.
Those are some examples. To think that we can accommodate the layout needs of user with no changes to existing markup is probably not realistic. I will note though that going back through the skins, the problem isn't as prevalent as I had thought. In most cases the header is the same, and it's the footer or sidebar that change, and I've pretty much standardized on: ! %block sitetitle%[[{$ScriptUrl} | {$WikiTitle}]] %block tagline%{$WikiTagline} So whilst the problem is less than I had thought, and I could probably remove it on some skins, it still exists. Perhaps though we take the approach of saying where it exists, it's part of the setup of the skin to manually have the user change the header/footer/sidebar formatting -- which they will basically have to do anyway,=. Another approach I thought of that might work in many cases is to consider the changed header/footers/sidebar as an entirely new page. So rather than using a list of pages, simply eliminate Site.Sidebar from the list -- just use the new page. ~ ~ David _______________________________________________ pmwiki-users mailing list pmwiki-users@pmichaud.com http://www.pmichaud.com/mailman/listinfo/pmwiki-users