Brian M Dube wrote: > Is anyone working on moving skins to a plugin? I'm going to have a go at it.
Fantastic. Yes we have talked about this before. Thank heaven that we documented this. I was very pleased to see http://forrest.apache.org/docs/dev/status-themes.html where we talk about a future framework to enable any "theme engine". We even link to a mail discussion. I still need to re-read that. Moving the skins functionality out is one aspect of cleaning up the core. So i hope that various developers can help with this. It is in everyone's interest, even if they don't want to use skins. We need to slim our core. I am not yet clear about your main aim. Is it to move the existing functionality out of the core and leave it at that (a legacy system)? Or is it to create a framework as described above which would enable future development of skins functionality as well as dispatcher. I would be keen to help with either. I am also trying to gauge whether there is community inclination to support further skins development. > I'm thinking of emulating the dispatcher to have a plugin for skin > functionality and a plugin to house the skins. This also got me thinking > about a separate plugin for each skin. I like the idea about a separate plugin for the skins functionality. Not sure yet what would go there. I presume this would be the "skinit" pipelines from the main/webapp/*.xmap sitemaps. These have become rather complex and might need to be re-written. Not sure what to do about the different skins. There would be a similar discussion in the archives about when the Dispatcher work established the f.a.o.themes.core plugin. Would there be equivalent to the current skins/common/ ? > Thoughts? Here are some more quick thoughts ... Let us continue to express our needs for a little while on this dev list, before launching into the actual development. There is some of the current skins stuff that can be re-used, while some aspects might need to be re-designed. Perhaps the first version would just move the existing stuff. I am not clear about the best approach. If we need to change some of the way skins work, then should we make a clean implementation and create a new skin that closely resembles the default "pelt" skin? We have warned people to be careful about creating their own skins. Are we able to support older style skins? On the other hand perhaps the existing functionality is fine to create a new skins framework via plugins. -David
