[pyblosxom-users] Flavours and templates

[Chris G <cl...@is...>]

As a (second time around) newcomer to pyblosxom I find the Flavours
and Templates setup a little confusing.  I'll try and explain my
problems in the following sections.

1 - There seem to be two different sorts of flavours, maybe they both
    work the same way but it's still confusing.  There are the
    flavours to produce different *sorts* of output, e.g. RSS and Atom
    and html, and then there are (presumably) flavours to produce
    different appearance in one type of output (like 'skins' in other
    applications).  

    Initially at least it's not at all obvious how to produce
    different HTML flavours, e.g. how to change pyblosxom's
    appearance.  The documentation doesn't seem to tell one how to do
    this, it only gives a rather unrealistic 'joy' example.

2 - The default HTML flavour doesn't seem to follow the rules, it's in
    a directory called html.flav but the files in that directory
    *don't* have the .html suffix. So when you look at the files in a
    downloaded flavour they don't match the default ones and you're a
    bit stuck knowing what to do.

3 - I found the only sensible way to change to one of the downloaded
    flavours was to put the xxxx.flav directory into the flavours
    directory of my blog installation and then change its name to
    html.flav. (In reality one can shuffle directory names between
    different flavours using symbolic links of course)

4 - It isn't clear what the default_flavour in config.py refers to, is
    it the name of the flavour directory (e.g. the html in html.flav)
    or is it the suffix on the template files inside that directory?
    Or is it both?  (I guess it depends where the template files are
    installed but I'm not sure).  It seems a bit odd anyway to have to
    call a flavour which is really an HTML flavour some other name and
    thus change the suffix on the template files - or am I totally
    confused here?

5 - The different places where one can install the flavour files add
    to the confusion, I guess this has changed as pyblosxom has
    changed. It would maybe be a good idea to describe one way of
    doing it fully (for me the flavours directory in $blogdir) and
    then say there are other possibilities.  At the moment it's a bit
    mixed up (this may relate to the confusion between the name of the
    flavour being a directory name or the suffix on the template
    files). 

6 - Not all of the flavours in the flavours directory work and those
    that do have a lot of hard-coded links to files in the authors'
    blogs.  A little bit more information in the README about the blog
    layout and what plugins are being used would help.
    


Phew!  :-)

N.B. I *have* managed to change flavours after a little perseverence,
it's not *that* difficult.


-- 
Chris Green