Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Different look of every instance of given package

Marcin, if you have a package mounted at /subsite/notes then any files you place in the filesystem at ${acs_root_dir}/www/subsite/notes will overide files from the package directory ${acs_root_dir}/packages/notes/www.

Unfortunately there's a bug so you cannot just overide the adp page of a tcl/adp pair, you will have to copy both to the new location and then modify the adp page and/or the tcl.

Jun, I had the same (I think) idea a while ago.  My concern was that there is not much design reuse in adp pages as there is code reuse in tcl pages, and this makes enforcing consistent design etc. a pain.

We already have our own XML-like markup language with adp tags, but it's used mostly as a wrapper around Tcl programming constructs.  If we extended the usage to the page level design with <sectionheader>, <loginwidget> and <sortabletable> etc. then pages would look consistent, development would be faster, and design could be changed in one place.

As you mention, the HTML output of these tags would all be labeled logically for CSS transformation by the client, which would handle the vast majority of design changes a website owner would want to make.

The hard part is identifying the common design idioms you want to support, and coming up with logical names.  I thought this surely must have been done before, but last time I looked, I couldn't find anything I could just pinch from.  I'd like to see something like this happen though, so let me know if you want a hand. (not interested in regexping or xslting at the mo, sorry).