Forum OpenACS Development: Templating

1: Templating

Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 07/16/02 12:17 PM

Is there a module which allows editing of the .adp tags through the
OACS system (either upload or webedit), which keeps track of versions
and changes (could use diff for that one or CVS)? Would be interesting
to have, if the new release of OpenACS has changed .adp files you
edited for your site (so the APM could warn you, that you changed
those files locally and offer you to see the diffs between the
official OACS versions as well as your one and the official, so you
could amend yours as you like). Would also help with internationalization.

I know that RedHat has a templating system, I guess the Greenpeace CMS
allows something like that as well, any other solutions out there that
may make it into the OACS 4.6 release (unless I was just to dump to
find it in the vast area of modules available for OACS at the moment) ?

2: Response to Templating (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 07/17/02 02:39 AM

I haven't thought of the particular point you bring up. CVS could be of help here if you've set things up with the future in mind.

For Greenpeace we set up a scheme where individual national organizations can provide their own templates to be used instead of the default templates. This means, among other things, that there's really no reason to edit the templates that come with the toolkit - a custom version can be made instead.

The way this is done isn't generalized though, being quite tied down to the organization of the site.

But it's caused be to think that something vaguely like this might be interesting to try to develop for acs-subsite instances. If we remember that "/" is just the top-level subsite a scheme that allowed for the substitution of standard templates with subsite-specific templates would perhaps be useful. At GP we made the substitution possible on the level of a single default template (just .adp not .tcl files as that fit the need). The kind of tracking you're discussing also applies to .tcl scripts ...