[Pmwiki-users] Skins

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 03:47:31PM -0500, Bob Dively wrote:
>
> Other apps I've looked with templating/skinning systems allow a designer
> to come up with some pretty html into which variables representing
> application blocks/sections are placed by a programmer. Perhaps people are
> finding PmWiki skinning confusing because a lot of it takes place within
> config.php which is a program file and not a layout file.

Perhaps, but I haven't figured out a good way in a template file to
indicate headers, footers, titles, etc. in order to be able to honor
the [[noheader]], [[nofooter]], [[notitle]], etc. directives and to be
able to properly embed variables such as $Title, $Group, $PageUrl, etc.  
Or, any that I've seen are just about as easily done by saying 
$PageHeaderFmt='...'; as they are by putting specialized sequences
such as (for example) <pageheeader> ... </pageheader> in a template file.  

It is *extremely important* to the overall success of PmWiki that the 
layouts be easy to customize, and the comments you all are sending are
very important to me, because what I'm hearing is that this is not
currently the case.  Unfortunately what I'm not hearing are the details 
as to *why* it's difficult, I just see that people wish it could be 
some other way.  So, help me out here, folks.  I'm thinking the 
difficulties must stem from one or more of

 - limitations of CSS as a layout language
 - lack of familiarity with CSS-based layouts
 - separation of content generation ($...Fmt variables in .php scripts) 
   from external layout (.css) files
 - difficulty in switching from the old 0.5 layout structure to the
   0.6 one
 - too many files and directories involved
 - lack of examples
 - lack of documentation
 - PmWiki just trying to provide too much in a layout structure

I'm really surprised at the number of people who've said they can't follow 
the structures in the stdlayout.php/pmwiki.php code, or that they're trying 
to modify the $HandleBrowseFmt and other $Handle...Fmt variables, as I 
wouldn't have thought any of these were necessary to produce a desired
layout.  So what am I missing?

Pm