one of the things i've been considering more and more over the last couple months is the idea of standardizing the page templates which are essential to each weblog. i think it would be very beneficial if we made some page templates (Weblog, _day, _css, _decorator) be (1) required and (2) not renamable.
I've been building a list of why I think this would help ... 1. The ability to rename these templates is seldom used and hardly beneficial to users. The names of these templates shouldn't ever need to be visible outside of the editing interface anyways. 2. Doing this would give us a bit more control on the UI. We could add smarter messaging and control measures when someone is working on a required template versus a custom template. Special messaging for users editing the Weblog template could be very helpful. 3. This could help us a bit with caching. Right now we all pages are considered equal because we can't really identify them. By standardizing the most common page templates we could use that info to do some potentially smarter caching, like caching individual weblog entries rather than just fully rendered pages. All in all I think this would be a good thing. I also had a side thought about the decorator template. Currently I am still not a fan of the decorator template mainly because it either has to be applied to all page templates or none of them. This seems inconvenient to me. I think it would be preferable if you could apply the decorator to only selected page templates. This would allow users the convenience of using the decorator without requiring that it be used for *all* templates. I think the best example in this case is a css page template. I would consider using the decorator template, except that I have a css template as well and if I use the decorator then my css template won't work. thoughts? comments? -- Allen
