[Slashcode-development] A color for each topic?

[Ralph D. <ra...@ma...>]

Thanks to all who helped me out with the "Read More..." link a few 
days ago. I can now navigate most references in and out of the 
template system. The full methodology (essentially, the template 
bracket-reference semantics) is still not totally obvious to me, but 
I can manage.

Moving forward with another adaptation, I would like to associate a 
COLOR with each TOPIC. I want this color to be used for the title bar 
of each story for that topic.

Leaving aside the various implementation details, the obvious way to 
accomplish this is to add a color field to the topic table. However, 
the Slash book cautions me against such a course of action, lest my 
version become incompatible with future upgrades.

The topic table is unlikely to acquire more than a few hundred rows. 
To me, simply adding one or a few new fields to such a table doesn't 
sound like it would be very much of a handicap in upgrades. Maybe I 
would need to do a few extra manual steps to add the field(s) and 
their data back in after the upgrade - something along those lines.

On the other hand, maybe someone can suggest a reasonable way to 
provide an easily configurable color for each topic -- without adding 
any fields to the topic table.

Any comments?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Ralph