[Koha-devel] Deprecating the Non-XSLT display on Detail and Search/List Results

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

On Wed, Apr 23, 2014 at 8:12 PM, David Cook <dcook at 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
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