[Koha-devel] Koha 3, new features local "includes" directory

[Joshua Ferraro]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 12:21:38PM +0200, Paul POULAIN wrote:
> During the dev_week, in May, we spoke of a new method to have 
> personalized templates.
> the idea being to have something more easy to changes than a full theme 
> of templates.
> It's very hard to keep a full set of templates uptodate, the 
> difficulties we have with default & npl on rel_2_2 branch show clearly 
> this !
I agree 100% here :-)

> We have divided our PROG templates in different conceptual parts :
> 
> * the header, in doc_head_open.inc & doc_head_close.inc (we have 2 so we 
> can put a <title> in it)
> * the main menu, in menus.inc
> * the module menu, in menu-modulename.inc. Each module (acquisition, 
> cataloguing, authorities, circulation, members, serials, parameters, 
> tools, reports...) has it's own included file.
> * the main part of the page : it's specific to each template.
> * the footer, in intranet-bottom.inc
> 
> I just have added a systempreference, called "intranet_includes" that 
> let you define the directory where the included files will be taken 
> from. by default, it's the "includes" directory. BUT, if you modify the 
> value to "includes_npl", you'll arrive to something that look like the 
> npl templates (roughly, it's just a Proof of Concept).
So is the idea that we have:

main.tmpl
includes/doc_head_open.inc
includes/doc_head_close.inc
includes/menu_modulename.inc
includes/intranet_bottom.inc

Meaning that main.tmpl never changes with different templates,
only the includes do? The problem I have with this it doesn't solve
the biggest template problem I encounter. Many of my clients
want to make minor label changes to various elements on a main page,
or even remove elements.  For instance, they want to change 'Catalog
Search' to 'Search the Catalog'. Most of the other changes they
want can be done with the new layout and color css files in
rel_2_2 ... any ideas for solving this problem without having
to maintain multiple tempaltes?

Cheers,
-- 
Joshua Ferraro                       SUPPORT FOR OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE
President, Technology       migration, training, maintenance, support
LibLime                                Featuring Koha Open-Source ILS
jmf at liblime.com |Full Demos at http://liblime.com/koha |1(888)KohaILS