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

[Hans]

Friday, April 8, 2005, 10:36:44 AM, Joachim wrote:
> 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.)

I agree. In GeminiTwo and FixFlow the unordered list of action links
gets treated so that each link lines up horizontally (floats) and if
the space gets too short the line of links will wrap into the next
line. It looks not too pretty with a double row, but it does not break
the design.

> 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.the layout.

This sounds like bad skin design. The skin should not show any
features which require special cookbook scripts, it should be all part
of the skin package.

> It's not as clear whether the admin wants to actually see the new action
> in the action list. He may prefer to type the ?action=... string on the
> URL bar manually.

I don't like seeing a link to action=attr, it invites too much
trouble. Those who need to change password attributes can do so using
the address bar; just my opinion :-)

> (The only reason I can imagine is that it's something
> that end users aren't supposed to see. If that's the only reason (are
> there others?), that can be handled using a permission-based approach:
> show exactly those actions that are available under the current 
> permissions.)

This may be fine indeed, but the exact mechanism for this is not clear
to me yet. I think I could employ the cookbook script "Authenticated
as conditional", but I am waiting for a pmwiki internal solution, and
Pm said the whole authentication handling is getting rewritten at
some point (before the pmwiki 2.0 release), so I am wary to introduce
code in wiki pages which may all need to change.


Best, 
~Hans