[Slashcode-development] css - is this possible

[shane <sh...@lo...>]

As it stands now, the css in slash-cvs is based on certain criteria,  
mainly:

user.currentsection, user.currentpage

What's css.theme intended use for?
How does one control what 'theme' the user is currently using?

What I am trying to figure out is this: let's say we have a yearly  
office party. We normally use a virtual url such as tld/party to  
point to tld/parties/party2006 or last year's tld/parties/party2005.  
That's done through mod_rewrite.

This party lets staffers and our outside vendors register to attend.  
The vendors pay to attend, so some of their registration is through ssl.

To process all this we created a slash::party plugin, which has  
party.pl. our entry in the css table points the css.page to 'party'.

Each year we  want this page's cosmetics to be unique. So we created  
a topic 'party', made it a nexus, created a skin with url party.tld  
and associated the skin with the topic 'party' nexus. i create new  
templates too: header\;party\;party, footer\;party;\party and index 
\;party\;party

So everyone hits the url and it looks sweet and everyone pays and  
registers through party.pl.

However, 2007 runs around. We create a 2007 item in slash::party's  
data, and we enter the event and misc information into the plugin's  
data so people can sign up to attend the event.

Only one catch - for historical, and search-engine value, management  
wants the 2006 pages to stay up on the website, and they don't want  
it's cosmetics to change.

Yet, 2007 will look entirely different from 2006.

There'in lies my problem/question. what's the best soln' for  
something such as this?

Most places just create /parties/party2006.asp or party2006.html.  
Since the registration process is interactive, we can't get away with  
doing it in html (if we could, we could control the style sheet used  
in each year's html, simple enough).

I suppose we could also use templates, ie /parties/party2006.tmpl  
since the correspondeing templates files are used to process the  
'body', and we can embed template-logic within each .tmpl to deal  
with the application process. however, i think the header and footer  
for a .tmpl are pulled from the templates html-header, linkrel,  
header and footer. So this may not work.

if party has a $constants->{default_year}, and someone hits party.pl? 
y=2006 I was considering maybe I could use the css.theme to match to  
'2006' so a different style sheet will be chosen?

that _might_ work if only the stylesheet has changed. if the html w/ 
in the templates needed to change, then the nexus would somehow have  
to change with the given year such that the skin would match to  
another skin, would would pull another set of templates out of the db.

So there's my big question. I've been mulling this around in my mind  
for a while now, trying to figure out the "best implementation  
method" that still fits within slash's API. Any suggestions appreciated.

  Shane