Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Any comment from the community?

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Let's just say Jon is right what needs to be done and I think it is good to have it written down. Will we have the time to do it? Well, I start to use XoTCL already quite a lot. I offered to write the code that lets you edit the templates and css files, yet was stopped by Don who wants to clean up the current issues with templating and CSS before going down that road.

Moving to naviserver is an option, but at the moment, who has the time to test it? Gustaf did this at some time so he would probably be able to give a good introduction what he found out.

As for moving stuff out of OpenACS, feel free to do it. I guess we have enough on our hands to get stuff into OpenACS to think about abstracting stuff and get it out 😊.

No need to start a flame war. OpenACS is a niche product which allows us especially with the latest version of xotcl-core, to really go wild and quickly develop applications. But it is a niche product and if it werent for ]po[, aims, xo* we could just call it .LRN. And I would strongly ask the .LRN crew to think outside the box and make sure (before releasing) that things still work outside .LRN.

We did a mistake with the 5.3.1 release especially with regards to the large amount of changes that needed to be done there. Hopefully a lesson has been learned and we can clean up the situation by the 5.4 release.

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Just wanting to let you know that developer support on 5.4 has a new "uber" feature which is CSS editing. You see your current webpage, click on CSS and get all the currently used CSS files (yeah, webdeveloper can do that for you as well) on a new webpage. What webdeveloper cannot do for you is edit the file and *save it to disk*. Neither is it able to provide revisions for those CSS files that you edited or allow you to go back to a previous revision based on the description developer support stores in the content repository.

People might argue why this is not in package <insert package here>, especially as you might not want to give CSS designers developer support access, on the other hand this was the most convenient place to put it and whoever wants can take the code and stuff it somewhere else.

This has been a joint effort during the ]po[ developers conference between UNED and myself, so kudos for their hard work. Additionally this requires that you have working template::head::add_css commands and that none of your CSS files is loaded manually. Last but not least, make sure that you can access the CSS file from /resources/<insert package here>/....., as I need to somehow find the file on the harddisk 😊.