Hi, On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:12 PM, David Cook <dcook@prosentient.com.au> wrote:
What do people think about deprecating the non-XSLT display on detail and search/list results pages?
0. Here follows some thinking aloud: One of the main advantages of the XSLT display templates is that they have full access to the entire metadata record, and as a consequence it's possible to put in complicated display logic without having to write custom Perl code. This mattered quite a bit at the time that XSLT display system was introduced because HTML::Template::Pro lacked good support for things like filters and template functions. Removing the non-XSLT templates would also make it possible to remove a fair amount of code for extracting data from MARC records, as that could be left to the XSLT templates. The big downside is that XSLT is not particularly user-friendly, particularly if you want to make changes that go beyond tweaking a couple labels. The verbosity of XSLT's syntax also can get in the way of developers wanting to make changes. However, the importance of that consideration depends on an answer to a question that I, for one, don't have a good sense of: how many Koha libraries actually make major changes to their OPAC record displays? Nowadays, if I were asked to put together a fresh set of OPAC templates for Koha, I would probably do it via Template Toolkit, but organized differently: the search results and bib details code would just pass along metadata (for now MARC::Record) and item objects to the template, and there would be a site of helper functions available for grabbing display values. Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton Manager of Implementation Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts email: gmc@esilibrary.com direct: +1 770-709-5581 cell: +1 404-984-4366 skype: gmcharlt web: http://www.esilibrary.com/ Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org & http://evergreen-ils.org