request for comments - display and front end

[iamdecal]

a couple of presentation things i'd like to ask peoples opinions about.

As you may have noticed, i use comoblog for the back end of my site, but i've got a custom perl front end, since i'm now one of the developers, thats not really acceptable - eating your own dog food is the industry term - so i'm moving back to como for the front end as well, to be happy with it though, i'll need to make a few changes.

if you use como or easymoblog, and you've modified  it at all, id like to see what you've done - i've seen two or three out there that are pretty amazing but i dont think its fair for me to post the URLs with out permision (blogs being personal some times)

A:) skining or themes for the site? i think it would be nice to use a csszengarden approach, (http://www.csszengarden.com/)  where the html never changes and all the display is done via css, - as you can see at the zen garden site, there are some stunning things that can be done this way, but do other people think it would be too limiting? would you prefer to be able to modify all the templates and have different html for each  style ?

I think clicking on a post title should take you through to the post - with all comments and track backs visible.

In general - do you think comments should be in date order or reverse date order?  - id sau add an option in admin so the site owner can decide, but which should be the default?

feel free to add more thoughts to the thread, its just to get the conversation started really.

[Bill]

I was going to ask about templates! I think your approach would be quite nice with the CSS. Possibly much simpler than creating a whole new template. You could even run something like csszengarden does where you give the html and then everyone submits the style sheet for a contest of sorts. I think another option would be a template starter kit of sorts for those that do want to make their own templates. I would like to make one for the challenge but would much rather go with CSS.

I can go either way with the comments and trackbacks showing.

Reverse date order could  be better since it would show the most recent comment first.

[Mark Wallis (aka serialmonkey)]

Heya mate.

However we do this we want to minimise the pain that occurs during CoMoblog upgrades - I hate it when I customise an application only to find that I have todo it all over again when I want to upgrade to a new version.

Would be nice if we could support some sort of dynamic skinning - CSS is a very nice approach for this and I love the work being done at ZenGarden.

It would be nice if we could introduce a new sections like the existing Modules section called "Skins". Skins have an XML file that says which version of CoMoblog they support and provide a complete new set of CSS files that override the existing CoMoblog CSS's.

Of course, todo this we need todo major work to remove the layout from the existing XTemplate's and into the CSS.

I like the idea of all comments and track backs being visible on the posts.php - at the moment I don't see the value of that page at all.

Comments should be in date reverse order by default - with a config option. Raise that as a RFE if you like, should be pretty easy to knock together now.

[iamdecal]

ive taken another look at skining this recently,  my current approch is just a simple module called mod_skins that allows users to select alternate style sheets, very much like zengarden as mentioned above.

this is loaded in addition to , but after the original style sheets, so that if any thing is missed out from the skin (ie new modules are added) they can still be tweaked from the admin area, but anything in the skin style sheet will over ride the previous settings

however before i release it, id like some one to take a look at the site temlates and see how they can be optimised for this approach, (front end isnt really my thing)

any takers ?

[Mark Wallis (aka serialmonkey)]

My thoughts are that skinning is pretty 'core' functionality and that we should implement it in the base code rather than a module.

My thoughts have been to change the HTM templates to "basic" HTML without any layout and then use hardcore CSS for the skins.

At a high-level the work required would be to

1. Introduce a new admin page to selecting and uploading skins

2. Clean out the HTM templates to only include basic HTML data with no-layout

3. Write a default skin based off how CML current looks

[Ricky]

Man that CSS Zen Garden is a cool site.  This would open up the software to even more bloggers!