[pmwiki-users] Re: Wikified action lists

Bronwyn Boltwood arndis at gmail.com
Thu Aug 4 15:53:22 CDT 2005


On 8/4/05, Hans <design at flutesong.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
> Thursday, August 4, 2005, 6:29:14 PM, Bronwyn wrote:
> > The skin code snippet reminded me that people will want to set
> > accesskeys for action lists stored in wikipages.  I wasn't sure if a
> > solution had been found, so I checked out Han's skins, and there it
> > is.  It's so nice to find something's already solved...
> 
> One beautiful thing would be if we could share the wiki pages
> containing action lists, i.e. for top and foot action menus,
> amongst skins.

The difficulty that I see is the goal itself: everyone wants different
things in different places.  Using wikipages to hold skin components
means that admins can and will customize them easily, so skin
designers will not know what is already in those wikipages, or what's
missing.  Pages customized to work well with Skin A might not make
sense for, or be missing critical links in Skin B.

There will have to be much more consensus on what the basic functional
blocks are before I ship a skin that uses common but not standard
wikipages for important content.  I don't want to ship skins that are
broken out of the box, even if the reason is that the site had custom
pages.  In the meantime, I suggest using (:include:) to share content
between skins.

Another problem with it, according to my designer's ego, is that the
work I put into selecting and arranging the skin's interactive parts
(wiki commands and so on) may be completely ignored, or broken by
someone's existing customizations.

> PageTopMenu and PageFootMenu hold lists of links, and Pm added the
> action keys. Perhaps they could serve other skins as well.
> But I never wanted to restrict these config pages to *only* action
> links. If a user/admin wants to include links to other pages etc it
> should work just as well. I even included a status/info line in the
> Foot, showing pagemodified etc. also login/logout links can just go
> into these pages.

I'm not using all of my new snippets just for actions, either.  The
number and content of the blocks is uncertain at the moment, though --
Pukka is undergoing major surgery.
 
> Maybe this does not go too well with a skin using tabs? I don't know.
> But if it does I would welcome cross-skin integration. Then users
> switching skins don't need to reconfigure another set of action lists.

First let's see what functional blocks I create on my own, and then we
can see how well they match up to yours. :)

Bronwyn




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