Re: [SM-DEVEL] Template inheritance

[Paul L. <pa...@sq...>]

On 10/6/06, Alexandros Vellis <av...@no...> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-10-06 at 08:57 -0500, Steve Brown wrote:
>
> > Forgive me for saying so, but that doesn't seem very powerful at all.  Basically
> > what this means is that you can have an endless string of parent templates, but
> > only one parent?  Alexandros, I thought your original question had to do with
> > multiple inheritence of templates.  If it didn't, then it probably should. ;)
> > Single-parent inheritence makes sense some degree of sense from the developer's
> > perspective, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to the end user who
> > wants to combine several templates sets to make his own template.
>
> TBH I haven't thought about multiple inheritance at all, and perhaps it
> _is_ a good idea.

After thinking it over, I don't think this goes anywhere good.

> The purpose of inheritance, for me, and the original motivation, is
> making it easy for people to write their customized templates based on
> existing ones.
>
> Most people wouldn't want or be able to write a new template from
> scratch. Most people would only like to do minor cosmetic changes, or
> add their logos in certain places, or adapt some specific parts to their
> environments. For these people, it would be very convenient, I believe,
> to be able to copy over only a couple of files from a ready-made
> template and tweak only that.

Yes, exactly.  And that's why you simply inherit from that skin and
add a couple of your own files with your own tweaks.  If you like
"Skin A" but really want to use the login page from "Skin B", then
inherit from Skin A and copy the login template from Skin B manually.
Inheriting from both would be hard to predict, and probably pretty
unintuitive to the skin developer.

> Later, when upgrading to a new Squirrelmail stable version that fixes
> some stuff in the templates, or when the external template set that they
> were based upon has some things fixed and is updated,  it would be far
> more convenient to them to merge their changes with the upstream
> changes. Otherwise, they would have to manage a whole directory that
> once used to be default_advanced..
>
> I don't know if this motivation is good enough for you to justify the
> template inheritance complexity, but at this point it somehow seems good
> enough to me.

Which does?  Single inheritance?