From: <ja...@st...> - 2008-11-27 19:22:34
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Oh - I thought you meant in G2, hence my confusion. In any case, I like this general idea - a transparent way to define an unlimited number of views in the theme code, and a module to assign them. Extra points if the module can assign either by hierarchy or manually (if not, it should be manual). I think this has the potential to reduce a lot of the complexity you mentioned while still covering every case I can think of. Some sort of theme settings page will probably be essential, though, both for this and other things (rows, columns, blocks, all the stuff that's there now). It's possible that this could be small enough to just be a block on the main "edit album" page though - I'll do some more thinking on this, I can put together a mockup if you'd like. My current general thinking is: 1. Master theme settings page in the site admin, similar to what we have in G2. Next to certain settings that some may want to override per-album (rows, columns, blocks), we have a checkbox that says "allow override" or something. If that's checked, those settings go to.... 2. A theme block on the "edit album" page. This has all the overrideable settings. 3. Multiple views: we need a framework for defining new views (what template and css file they use) that is simple enough for someone with very basic php skills. The multiple views feature would add a dropdown to items 1 and 2, allowing the user to give the view its own settings and assign views to albums, respectively. Extra points if this also adds a section to item 1 that allows hierarchical assignment of views (view a for the first level album, b for the first sub-albums, etc), and it will at least add capability for assignment of a default view. Now that I think of it, default view probably has an "allow override" checkbox too, so a third party multi-view theme could essentially be used in either mode. To me, this is an ideal solution to serve both the basic user and the more advanced themer, as the basic user has the simplest UI possible by default, and it is extremely easy for the advanced user to turn on the features they need. My only concern with this not being core is that it's using pages that would be part of the core, and I don't know how easy it would be for a module to insert, say, those view dropdowns into pages that are already part of the core admin. However I could understand if this needs to wait for 3.1, so long as that isn't a very long wait - a large number of users will not upgrade until this feature is available. Thoughts? Jake Quoting Bharat Mediratta <bh...@me...>: > Jake Conner wrote: >> On Nov 26, 2008, at 1:53 PM, Bharat Mediratta wrote: >> >>> This is easily possible with one theme. You don't need 3 separate >>> themes to show 3 parts of your site. >> >> How do you do two radically different album views with one album.tpl? >> Or is it currently possible to have two album.tpl's in one theme? If it >> is, how do you select between them without hard-coding what album id >> gets what view? > > You can create a top level page.html.php that delegates to a variety of > other top level page types. Same with any entry level .html.php file. > The trick is to do it without having to hard-code album ids, and you can > do that relatively easily by writing a module that does that > configuration. I'm 90% sure that all of this can be accomplished > without changing any core code whatsoever, and we'll know more as we get > closer to the date. > > If at the end of this development cycle we have time and resources and a > finished UI which covers all the various edge cases, then we'll > seriously considering adding this feature. But until then, we have a > long list of things that are absolutely essential to the product (eg: > uploading photos, creating new albums, etc) which are a much higher > priority. > > -Bharat > > |