[Slashcode-development] section-topics-skins questions

[Shane <sh...@lo...>]

First off, everything that I could find about the new 'sections-topics' 
(aka 'skins' system) for slash I put up at

http://slash.lottadot.com/article.pl?sid=04/06/18/001233&mode=thread

I did that (not to upset Jamie/Peter) but instead to hopefully spread 
information on how the new code/system is supposed to work, until docs 
are written up for it.



i'm looking at slash's apache.pm... still seeing a lot of 
static_section and getSection used. am i misunderstanding or shouldn't 
both be depricated?



I also saw utils/convertDBto200406_suggest
Can someone elaborate a bit on how that should be used?


Are template names (name;page;section) going to change to 
name;page;skin?

What is a skin "member"? (I perldoc'd perldoc 
Slash::Utility::Environment)


And - last item - our own code/plugins:

figuring out what "section" we are in - I'm unsure how to do that. This 
is what I came up with:

  my $gSkin     = getCurrentSkin();

(I was looking at Slash::Journal and Slash::Search to see how they did 
it)

However, Journal doesn't seem to pass on the $gSkin data to it's subs, 
but that's no biggie because it doesn't do any filtering the sql 
selects via the user's current section when it grabs from the db, so 
it's a poor example I guess.

Search eventually passes $form down and the sql grabs the primaryskid 
based on the
following criteria:

         my $skin = $reader->getSkin($form->{section} || $gSkin->{skid});
         if ($skin->{skid} != $constants->{mainpage_skid}) {
                 $where .= " AND primaryskid = $skin->{skid}";
         }

so I guess I'm wondering where $form->{section} vs $gSkin->{skid}
fit into all of this.

Search also does this:

         # Backwards compatibility, we now favor tid over topic
         $form->{tid} ||= $form->{topic};

should we migrate towards everything using {tid} instead of {topic}?

then search does this:

         # switch search mode to poll if in polls skin and other
         # search type isn't specified
         if ($gSkin->{name} eq 'polls' && !$form->{op}) {
                 $form->{op} = 'polls';
                 $form->{section} = '';
         }


so do we still need to worry about what form->{section} is set to, 
inorder to determine what section we really are in when our code runs?

  Shane