Forum OpenACS Development: Response to Use of master templates

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
An additional layer of indirection is always makes things more
flexible but the realized consequence of having all these
package local masters was that you could not change the
appearance of the site or a subsite by changing the sitewide master.
Maybe removing them all was a bit drastic but if they remained
what had been a pervasive and quite unpleasant misfeature
of almost all packages would crop up with about the same
frequency as it in the past (I think about 3/4 of the packages
simply got it wrong).

I also think that what people are generally trying to achieve
when they are talking about needing to have package local masters
is better done by changing the behavior of the master tag
so that it first looks to the package instance, then the nearest subsite, and finally to the main site to decide which master
template to use.  If you need a package local master you add it
and change a parameter rather than having the file there essentially
unused as a hook for something in most cases you should not
need.

If you don't do it that way then for each package you must either
use a package local master or not use it on a sitewide basis
and I think the most common use case would be to have a bunch of subsites that you want to have consistent styling and have it be the
subsite which drives which master to use.