Chris,
I love the idea you've got going here. I haven't had a chance to try
it but I have a few thoughts:
While the proliferation of tags can be bad for users, Radiant lacks
any mechanism for ensuring dependancies are installed making using
this extension within my own potentially destabilizes my extension.
This is a sufficiently fundamental thing that I'd be happier to see it
rolled into the core than distributed as an extension.
The examples in the readme all refer to things that are properties of
the page. It would be useful to better explain how something other
than the property of a page can be referred to.
As an aside, I think that there is a place for purpose specific
conditional tags. Personally I'm not convinced that
<r: if cond="content['body'] exists?"> blah </r:if>
is more readable than
<r:if_content />
to someone who isn't already a developer of some sort who understands
what a conditional is.
For example, I use Radiant for websites for a website that is managed
by a bunch of grey haired folk who think about authoring for the web
as a page was a piece of paper they put in their typewriter
(figuratively, fortunately). Radiant is a great tool for these sorts
of people, who legitimately need a good website but shouldn't have to
pay me to $100/hr to type in their content. I've shown them how to
create pages and write using Textile (which is nearly perfect for
this... unless I can ben one of the WYSIWIG plug-ins to my will). Tags
are not for them (fortunately). If these folk ever write any sort of
tag, after I pick myself off the floor I'll have to go ask them what
they're doing and try to do it "properly".
There are other classes of user between them and extension authors
(notably people who are not developers by trade but are hacking with
radiant to get things done) for whom purpose specific tags, while
limiting, can be a great aid to doing useful and interesting things. I
think that there is a place for these tags and I'd love it if there
was an easy way to use this to create both if_ and unless_ tags.
Something like:
conditional_tags "my_tag" do |tag|
#return a boolean
false
end
which would then create if_my_tag and unless_my_tag tags. For the if_
tag, the contents of the tag is executed when block returns true, and
the reverse happens for the unless_ tag.
This syntax combined with your generic tags would probably provide the
right level of excellence for all classes of user.
Now all we need is to simplify looping, another common tag type that
could be simplified for extension authors.
A
On 23-Oct-08, at 9:55 AM, Chris Parrish wrote:
Hello all. I'm finally releasing an extension that I've mentioned
over the last year on the list. I think that it has a lot of power
and potential but I could use some input from the Radiant clan.
The Conditional Tags Extension (http://github.com/SwankInnovations/radiant-conditional-tags-extension/tree/master
) creates <r:if> and <r:unless> tags that allow for flexible (and
customizable) conditions. Start with the README there -- it covers
what I'm thinking and a lot of what this thing can do.
I want this extension to be very easy to use for users (read: non-
developers) and also helpful to developers (I wrote it so that your
extensions can plug into the conditionals framework to easily add
your own values). Please help me make this one as useful as possible.
Thanks,
Chris
BTW, I apologize if this ends up being a double post. I think I
goofed something up when I sent it last night so I wanted to make
sure...
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