[Koha-devel] Theme Structure 3.0

[MJ Ray]

Dorian Meid <dnmeid at gmx.de> wrote:
> The plan, when I developed the THEME/LANG/OBJECT directory was that  
> it should be completely outside of the htdocs and then the relevant  
> objects should be linked into the webspace.
> 
> But it's long time ago and i'm not really up to date with the koha-code.

Thanks for the feedback.  That would make sense, but that's
not how the installer's worked since before I joined.  Also,
would that mean lots of hard-or-symlinks or large Alias lists?

[...]
> > koha then looks at templates/l10n/LANG:templates/tmpl/THEME
> > :templates/tmpl/THEME/LANG for its files, which may include
> > things from templates/htdocs served by the httpd.
> I don't understand what you mean with the colons between the paths

They're seperators of items in a list of directories, same
as you see if you echo $PATH at the command line.

> Could it be that your THING directory level mixes things which should  
> be on different levels?
> In my opinion there are e.g. images and includes which are specific  
> to a language.

Images with text should be the exception, not the norm.  When
they are used, they should nearly always be composed by CSS
overlays of text onto a base image, for ease of translation
and to keep themes language-independent as far as possible.

> So all language specific things should be below the language directory.

I agree.

[...]
> Then the scope. Why splitting more and more. Why not doing a move  
> frome scope to theme. So we could have a default-librarian theme (i  
> don't like the name intranet) and a default-opac theme. The backend  
> then should be the same and the opac-themes or other reduced themes  
> just don't use the whole functionality.

I'm not sure about this.  The feedback I get from customers
is that it's very important that their opac looks very much
like the rest of their web site, but it's less desirable
for their librarian/intranet site to be themed.  As kohadocs
grows, it may be desirable to look like the manuals.

The other motive is splitting up the namespace, to reduce
the amount of things that koha needs to handle and to reduce
the number of possible accidental collisions, where the same
name is used in two situations.

I don't feel that strongly about either of those.  Does anyone
have a strong reason for combining or splitting these?

> > This will let koha themes, styles and translations be maintained
> > and used independently.
> You can do this at tis time with the existing structure.

It seems like people have to check a theme for updates whenever
the master language of the theme is updated, and you cannot
use a language on a theme it hasn't been prepared for.  Have I
missed some feature there?

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray - see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
North End, Lynn, Norfolk, England
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
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