6.0.0-git
2024-12-07
Last Modified 2004-08-12 by eraserhd

Themes For Designers

This is a project I'm working on to provide web designers with the ability to completely change the look of a Horde-based site. I'm working on this as a patch because it can muck some things up and I don't want to put it into CVS until after Horde 3.0. You can checkout this page's attached files to find the current working version. --JasonFelice

Requirements

Everything Can Be Done By Editing XHTML Pages

This is what designers know how to do, so this is how designers will do it. The idea is that the designer can download a "blank" theme, which is a zip file with the full set of XHTML blanks in it, use DreamWeaver or whatever tools the designer generally works with, package the files back up, and upload the new theme.

Image-Scaling Hooks For Applications

Applications will need to be able to respond to a new theme so that they can scale their images to fit the templates. Most applications probably will not need to do this, but one requirement for our client is an online product catalog with customizable layout and image sizes.

Possibility of Multiple Blanks For One Object

As an example, some of the designs at http://oswd.org/ have multiple box styles. If we wanted to import these styles into giapeto, we'd need giapeto to support multiple box styles. We'd like the designer to be able to create new templates for these sorts of things and not be artificially constrained to a particular number. We also need this in our product catalog application since there is the possibility for many different product layouts.

I think we'll do this by allowing the designer to append two dashes and a name to the end of a file to create a named alternative. For example, if the designer has a "block.html" template, he or she can create a "block--style1.html" template or a "block--style2.html" template.