[pmwiki-users] Feature request: Action lists in skins

[Joachim Durchholz]

Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
> On 4/8/05, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> 
>>Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
>>
>>>On Apr 7, 2005 11:12 AM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
 >>>
>>>>When settin up my wikis, the one thing that I wanted was the standard
>>>>set of actions, plus any actions included via recipes.
>>>
>>>That I can understand.  It would be nice for admins to have a simple
>>>way to say they want to see actions x, y, and z, but not a or b.
>>>OTOH, that could pose some difficult problems when designing skins.
>>
>>What kind of problems?
> 
> [...]
> 
> Clearly there could be so many different answers to these questions
> that no one interface for PmWiki can completely meet the needs of all
> possible users.

Indeed.

>>One that I can think off-hand is that the action list might become too
>>large to look good. I.e. if the skin is designed for a horizontal row of
>>actions, and the action texts simply don't fit. (That's a reason why
>>wiki admins should have control over the action texts: so that they can
>>choose shorter ones.)
> 
> That's an excellent example.  Most horizontal list designs either look
> ugly or break if the tabs wrap to a second line, but it's not hard to
> make that situation come up with a narrow window and wide text. 
> Things like min and max-width are handy for dealing with that,

(unfortunately, MSIE ignores these attributes)

> but if the admin has added a bunch of actions that the skin designer
> didn't plan for, there could be more problems.

Right.

It's just that I assume that this kind of problems will better if the 
site admin is supposed to modify the skin to do his action lists. If 
anything, they will be worse.

>>So I first installed a few skins. Found that some of them had actions in
>>them that weren't installed at that point. Cursed - I'd have to remove
>>the action to avoid confusing my friend, then re-install them as soon as
>>I'd get around to installing those recipes that implemented the action.
> 
> Comment tags were your friends? :)

No, they were conspicuously absent from my mind :-}

Though that wasn't what unnerved me most. Adding a tag is (essentially) 
just a copy&paste operation. (Until you find that you omitted that 
target=_blank attribute... grmbl...)

I found it extremely annoying that I had to double-check all these 
changes. (No bananaware. No shipping of green ware and letting it ripen 
at the customer's site. Personal policy. *gg*)

Regards,
Jo