Re: [SM-DEVEL] Templating proposal?

[Rick C. <ri...@sq...>]

     We are indeed actively interested in developing a templating
     solution for SquirrelMail, and have discussed a number of ways
     of going about creating such a templating solution.

     Discussions so far have centered on a different solution for
     templating, but we would be *very* interested, both in hearing
     your opinions on why your solution is superior, as well as in
     your help in bringing SquiirrelMail to that point.

     Your input and contribution is much appreciated, and I look
     forward to hearing more about your ideas on templating!

     -Rick
     Head Nut



Giribet Farré, Daniel said:
> Dear fellow developers,
>
>
> I am writing to you regarding the SquirrelMail project. We are about to
> successfully deploy some Squirrel installations, so this mail is not
> about installing issues or operation. Being a multisite european project
> (located in Spain, but using the Catalan language) we have translated
> the webmail strings and made some modifications to the code to adapt the
> look-and-feel to our different site deployments (we have mainly added
> pervasive support for CSS).
>
> The process has gone well and we are about to enter production status
> (1.2.7). However, as we are taking a look at our options for upgrading
> to the next 1.2.8 stable revision, we have noticed (as expected) that
> all our look-an-feel changes need to be painstakingly reapplied.
>
> We have given some thought to this and we wonder if a templating
> strategy could not be successfully applied. Before delving into it I
> checked out the FAQs and docs but I have failed to find a direct
> reference as to why it is not yet applied or if it will be in the future
> (sorry if this is a oft-discussed thing and you have already reached a
> conclusion).
>
> We tought of giving it a spin and we chose PatTemplate from 'PHP
> Application Tools' (http://www.php-tools.de), which is coincidentally,
> winner of the PHPKitchen template award (just like Squirrel in its
> category), which is not greatly convoluted and has no dependencies. We
> have successfully (in an afternoon) applied it to a page on the 1.2.8
> branch and the results look very good. We can completely change the
> layout and localization without touching any code and without involving
> techies (only graphical designers). I have talked to our CTO and she
> likes the results and would like to pursue this direction.
>
> I wonder if this templating scheme could not be applied to Squirrel as a
> whole. I can easily picture you saying "yeah, whatever, and so many
> other things could be improved/changed". However, I am positive that I
> can convince management to assign a person to do a complete conversion
> of the base Squirrel code to use PatTemplate (of course released under
> the current license which is GPL I think). Of course, this change would
> only have sense if it ultimately were merged into the main source tree
> of Squirrel, and I wonder if such a thing would have the approval by the
> majority of the Squirrel developer and user community. I think that a
> code demonstration would speak for itself and the whole community would
> benefit from this, though to initiate such a project we would need some
> sort of 'go' from the dev community to either have CVS access (maybe
> creating a new branch) or the compromise someone would take a deep look
> at our code and results.
>
> I would also contact the PatTemplate folks to notify them of this and
> maybe work out any licensing issues (I think they are under the LGPL).
> We could use a wrapper class to abstract ourselves from the actual
> templating engine or even write on of our own, but let's not reinvent
> the wheel yet again (first thing I thought we should avoid). Anyway, if
> a pure in-house strategy is desired, if someone supplies a decent enough
> PHP templating code I would be happy to use it instead of Pat.
>
> I have the working PHP concept demo (two or three files) and templates,
> if someone is interested, please tell and I will send them. Results are
> great. I hope you are interested.
>
>
> Best,
>
> Daniel Giribet
> Engineer - CCRTVi
>
>
>
>
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