[pmwiki-users] Note to skin designers

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Feb 18 20:08:58 CST 2005


Hello, all--

This is a note asking for a quick review/test of the various skins
currently loaded on pmwiki.org.  Tonight on pmwiki.org I made a few 
changes to PmWiki's skin processing code (somewhat substantial, described
below), and although I *think* I was able to do this such that it doesn't
impact any existing skins, I'd like to have others briefly verify that
this is the case before I issue the new code as beta22.

The changes I made are designed to make it much easier to enable/disable
sections of a skin template.  For example, a number of sites have asked to
be able to "turn off" the sidebar when editing a page (to provide more
editing space), and several skin designers will tell you that this
has indeed been a pain.  With the new setup, a wiki administrator 
(or skin designer) can simply do:

    if ($action == 'edit') SetTmplSection('PageLeftFmt', 0);

to cause the PageLeftFmt section (containing the sidebar) to be
suppressed in the output.  Similarly, one can do

    if (!PageExists(FmtPageName('$Group.SideBar', $pagename)))
      SetTmplSection('PageLeftFmt', 0);

to display the left sidebar only if the $Group.SideBar page exists.

The new code also allows skin designers to create template sections
in addition to the ones predefined by PmWiki such as PageLeftFmt,
PageTitleFmt, etc.  For example, a skin designer can now define sections
such as <!--PageTopMenuFmt--> or <!--PageCommandsFmt--> and have them
automatically appear in the output and be switchable using the
SetTmplSection() function above.  Previously this was possible
only by adding the additional desired sections names into the 
$BasicLayoutVars array, which was a bit of a pain.

Again, at this point I'm mainly looking for feedback to determine
if the changes I made have broken any skins that are currently on
pmwiki.org (and if so, how).  I'm aiming for complete compatibility
with existing skins so that nothing will break as a result.

Note that this probably won't fix any bugs that were previously in 
the skins, however -- those should still be there.  :-)

Also, if pmwiki.org's skin configuration is out of 
date for any skin, now is a good time to let me know so 
I can update pmwiki.org accordingly.

Pm



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