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

[Bronwyn Boltwood]

On Apr 7, 2005 11:12 AM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> It's the wrong target audience. Skin designers don't (well, shouldn't)
> care what goes into the action lists. All they need to know is that they
> have to place that "ActionList" thing somewhere (just as they should
> place the SideBar somewhere, which 90% no doubt do by copying the code
> from pmwiki.tmpl - I did so myself when I did my first experiments with
> skins).
> 
> Skin designers don't care (and don't need to care) how the various
> action URLs are encoded. (That's also something that I don't like about
> having the action links in the skins. If I'm a skin designer, I have to
> learn about all the ?action= conventions. I'm also constantly worried
> that I may have put too many or too few links into the action list.)

I beg to differ.  One of the reasons that I started developing PmWiki
skins was specifically to change the actions and action list!  I
wanted to improve the behaviour of the interface as well as its look,
and that means my work is in the place where function and form meet. 
I'm not satisfied to just paint on pretty colours.

>  > And as a group wiki admins are far less comfortable with PHP than
> > with HTML/CSS.  By moving the action list out of the skin and
> > into a structured PHP array, we're moving farther away from the world
> > that most wiki admins live in (HTML), and we're removing control of the
> > output from the audience that needs and demands it most.
> 
> Do they indeed need that control?
> 
> 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.

> I specifically did *not* want to delve into the intricacies of the
> action lists in the skins. I didn't even want to bother with the skins
> at all. Yet I was forced to deal with them.

>From the next few paragraphs, I would assume that you installed some
recipes with extra actions, and wanted an interface beyond typing in
an URL?  You make it sound as if somebody held a knife at your throat,
until, shaking with fear, sweating from deciphering raw HTML, you
fulfilled the villain's demand that to create an action link in a
PmWiki skin or die a horrible death!

Somehow I doubt that it happened quite like that.

> action links - I had to experiment. The recipe author didn't tell me -
> he just provided the ?action link and handed me the obligation to decide
> what to do with it.

That would be because the recipe creator can't be completely certain
what you want to do with it.  No matter what he chooses, somebody will
dislike it.  As for the skin authors, well, they have no way of
knowing what recipes you have installed and want a UI for.

Bronwyn