[Pmwiki-users] Skins

[Bob Dively]

Thomas -Balu- Walter <list+pmwiki-users at b-a-l-u.de> wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 10:00:20PM -0500, Bob Dively
> wrote:

>> This is much closer to what people are thinking when
>> they talk about a skin/template system. It definitely
>> makes it easier for designers to do their thing without
>> lots and lots of help from a programmer.
>
> I am not sure weather we should support designers more,
> but forget about the programmers then :).

My own opinion on this - and I'm a programmer - is that
programmers are important and in a lot of ways PmWiki is a
programmer's wikiwiki but that PmWiki won't ever gain wide
acceptance without allowing people to easily customize the
way it looks. PM has done a great job of packing lots of
features in a small, easy to deploy package. I started
setting up wikis a few years ago, and I can tell you that
PmWiki is one of the easiest I've ever deployed (at least
until I tried to get it going on Windows - but that's not
PmWiki's fault ;-). However, none of that will matter to the
a non-programmer who wants to install it on his or her
website because what people care most about (at least
initially) is how things look. If a user can't quickly
configure the app to look the way they want, they will
abandon it. I've seen it over and over. This is particularly
true of corporate people who have some specific set of
standards to which they must adhere. So, I think that making
the templating/skinning system as easy/flexible as possible
is key.

> The designers would have to learn where to put which
> placeholder anyway, I don't think it would be harder for
> them to learn <!--PageHeaderFmt--> or <?php
> printPageHeader(); ?> - but the second one would allow
> programmers to do a lot more with the output (e.g. buffer
> and modify it).
>
> I don't really see a reason why (incomplete | to be
> included) PHP scripts shouldn't be allowed to be in a
> public accessible directory either. Just add a new first
> line in all scripts that are to be included:
>         if (!defined('pmWiki')) exit;
> And make sure you define pmWiki in the scripts that
> include them :)

This is how I've seen it done in CMS applications that are
skinned/templated, so it would definitely work fine in
PmWiki.

>> Or maybe escape the $ with another $, so that $$ is
>> evaluated the same way $VarName is?
>
> Why add more special things to know if PHP code can
> handle that nicely?

I'm confused. Do mean that PmWiki would not have to escape
'$'s if variables were put into the template with <?php
printPageHeader(); ?>?

-v