[Koha-devel] Koha.next: Consolidate OPAC themes?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

At present we distribute two OPAC themes with Koha, "prog" and CCSR.
I like both of them, though it is nice having a mobile theme in the
shape of  CCSR.

That said: in my view having two stock themes is going to present us
with a long-term maintenance problem, even nightmare.  Any template
change to one *must* be applied to the other.  Inevitably, one theme
(most likely prog) will fall off the radar of most Koha developers.
Also inevitably, functionality differences will creep in between the
two themes. Furthermore  the prog theme will continue to have users
who will justifiably complain if a stock theme becomes a second-class
citizen.

How do I know this will happen?  The Evergreen community went through
a similar experience with its old-style OPAC, which at one point had a
stock theme and a visually more modern theme called Craftsman.  Since
the underlying templates were duplicated, a point came where Craftsman
accrued functionality gaps, but still had its adherents who preferred
how it looked.

I would like to avoid that risk.

Consequently, I think the next version of Koha should unify the
templates of the prog and CCSR themes.  If we decide to continue
offering both appearances as stock options, the visual and layout
differences between the two should be managed strictly through the use
of CSS.  One way to do that would be to offer stylesheets that can be
managed via the opaccolorstylesheet sysprefs.  We could also decide to
add support for skins (which would be a named set of stylesheets) or
perhaps redefine OPAC themes to be just named sets of stylesheets, not
separate sets of templates.

Thoughts?

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at 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