Hi, I have a conceptual question (or idea) I would like to discuss with the experience people out there.
My background: experienced developer for GUI & commercial apps, newbie for web based applications. Trigger: I found no structural support for handling the navigation = basic application structure inside Pylons. Beeing a GUI kind of developer I'm quite accustomed to something like creating and manipulating "menu's" to guide the user, and to restrict what the user should be able to access. What I see is that the link structure of a site somehow represents the options and functionalities - and that the main, basic structure of a website is doing primarily the same job - besides the fact that links may represent different things: access to content, access to functionality, access to external stuff, etc. Beeing a orderly and structured nice guy I would like to have a basic functionality that offers me quick and easy design & delivery of such basic navigation capabilities - independent from any layout stuff. Thats the idea: all links which are "static" (in terms of access) are defined more-or-less by the application, to be more precise: in the pylon controllers. Call them NavLinks. All those links should be put into a central storage - call it the Navigator. The navigator is responsible to create the "right" set of links (they are often called "topmenu", "leftmenu", "rightmenu" in the CSS style sheets), and to feed them into the HTML generation processing (using mako templates e.g.). The Navlinks will have attributes like "access groups", "access roles" or "application states" which defines who is allowed to access the link. The Navigator will then use the data to select/filter the final link structure according to the data provided by the application (user is in group A, has role B, application is in state C). Additionally there is the definition of views necessary - a view is a preselected (hand-choosen) selection of NavLinks which represents a specific basic access structure. The Navigator would take the data of the Navlinks (describing controller, action, id etc), use the selected view for getting the basic structure and would filter the links additionally according to the users/application data. The result would be then put into the HTML generation process. I have implemented a prototype which is quite "handy" and I'm on extending this approach to support a more generic approach. I did the prototyp for getting a better touch for the conceptual aspect... What I'm interested in: is this approach the way a experienced Pyloniac would go? How do you "build" the basic structure of a website? Do you hand-code such stuff? Are there libraries used for this? Would such a generic Navigator + View + NavLink class system be interesting for the Pylons community? I would sponsor the stuff since I see that Pylons should offer such functionality beeing a web development environment... Any discussion, critics, ideas welcome... :-) Regards, Andrew --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to pylons-discuss@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
