I have actually been thinking about this quite a bit and have a number
of thoughts, so I apologize in advance for how long winded this is ...
I think it would be good to get a little more discussion of exactly what
we think people want to be able to customize in a theme without having
to edit templates. I think you gave all the right examples, but I'll
try and group them into categories and add a little more detail ...
1. CSS - this could be as simple as some color changes and maybe font
types, or as complex as allowing full css customization. i consider
this to represent a moderate portion of the customizations. i also
think this one is the most tricky because there are a *lot* of potential
items worth customizing when it comes to css and hard to ensure we are
capturing all the right ones.
2. Images - places where people want to insert their own image to be
used in a specific place in a theme, like in the header or sidebar, or
maybe an icon posted next to each entry title, etc. i would consider
this to represent a small part of the customizations. there are
probably a handful of situations for this one which will make up 95% of
the use cases.
3. Widgets - these are more complex components which add some kind of
new element to the page, like a flickr photos section, or technorati
info, del.icio.us tag cloud, blogroll, music selections, recent books
read, etc, etc. i think this represents the largest set of desired
customizations and represents for the most part what users are looking for.
4. Layout - this is technically CSS and is dependent on how the html is
setup, but basically represents the scenario where someone has a theme
that they basically like but want to change it from a 2 col to 3 col
layout, or move the sidebar from one side to the other, etc. i think
this represents a very small section of desired customizations.
As you said in the proposal, using theme properties will not solve the
situation for Widgets (#3) and I would also say that it would be very
hard to solve the Layout customizations (#4), so I would claim this
proposal is for solving the CSS and Image customizations.
So if we consider that refined problem set I would say that I agree that
theme properties would solve the custom Images (#2) well and would be
adequate at solving for CSS customizations (#1). However, even though
theme properties would solve both of these situations I think there are
a number of potential pitfalls ...
1. There is nothing built-in to help ensure that themes are property
designed for customization. Since it's entirely up to the theme author
to define the set of available customizations then the potential
customization for the theme is up to the theme author. This seems risky
to me because if someone designs a really nice theme but doesn't offer
much in the way of customization then we are right back where we started
with users having to edit the templates to accomplish what they want.
Granted, that this may not actually happen that much, but it's an issue
of control. We have no way of ensuring that themes are built with an
adequate set of customizations.
2. Increased complexity in design and maintenance of themes. Creating a
theme for proper customization now takes a reasonable amount of
additional effort, especially for simple designers who aren't interested
in maintaining large sets of customization variables throughout their
templates. So theme designers are now taking on the additional
complexity of having to break down their designs and identify all the
potential customizations, convert them into variables, and that makes it
harder to work on themes. So as a designer you are no longer setting
colors, fonts, etc, in the templates but instead in the property
definition file. To me this sounds like a discouraging influence for
theme authors.
3. Duplicate properties. There is a potential for a theme author to
create a property which is either already provided as a built-in part of
Roller, or will become a built-in part of Roller in the future. For
example, the user profile picture. Right now, Roller doesn't manage
that as a built-in attribute of a user or weblog, so a theme author may
create a property for "user.image". But then in a future version of
Roller we add in that data as part of the set of built-in data and now
we have duplication. I think this becomes a point of confusion for
users because they then have 2 places to manage the same data and often
times that leads to questions like "well, i set XXX here, so why isn't
it showing up on my blog?"
4. Limited control/validation of property input. Because the theme
properties are defined by the theme authors then we have a fairly
limited ability to do any kind of validation on data input for
properties. So for example, if a property takes a simple String value
then we have no way to A) ensure that the user inputs something valid
and useful to the them and B) we have no way to ensure that users don't
input something malicious for some reason.
5. Theme properties don't solve for Widgets, which I believe is
something that users are more interested in.
So, while I think that this proposal would work to solve part of the
problem of easing template customization, in general I am not really
sold on this specific approach. The biggest cons for me being that we
are making theme design more complicated yet still not ensuring that we
are providing all the customizations that users want, and that this
doesn't solve for Widgets at all, which I think is what I think users
want most of all.
I really like the breakdown on approaches to customization that you
blogged about and I would say that IMO we would be better off working on
the Widgets thing first. I think that is something that would have a
much higher value for most users and would also provide an immediate
benefit to all Roller blogs, even existing ones. So I might suggest
that we think about focusing this effort more on solving that part of
the problem first, before doing the theme properties or other ways of
solving for images/css customizations.
-- Allen
Dave wrote:
One of the things that new bloggers tend to complain about is theme
customization. It's just too hard to customize the look and feel of
your blog. And that's true even if you just want to make a couple of
minor tweaks like changing a banner image, changing a background color
or adding a "widget" to your sidebar (e.g. a Flickr badge of most
recent photos or an RSS listing of recent links from del.icio.us).
With Roller and most other blog servers I've used, you can configure
some aspects of your blog's layout and appearance via a web UI with no
HTML, CSS or template coding.
With Roller and others, you can configure these things:
* Change blog title and description
* Configure the number of posts displayed on main page
* Change from one stock theme to another
* Add links to your blogroll
* Add new categories to your blog
For everything else, you must customize, i.e. edit templates and deal
with HTML, CSS and a specialized template language. For non-geeks,
that can be pretty daunting. We should improve this situation by
making it possible for theme designers to make common customizations
easy -- i.e. to allow a user to configure a theme via a nice friendly
UI rather than customizing it via template editing.
Read the rest here:
http://rollerweblogger.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=Proposal_ThemeProperties
Please respond with comments here on the list.
- Dave
