Theme Manager

• Last modification: 2008-08-28 00:41:12.759871+02
• Status: DRAFT

What others do 

"theme" and "skin" are often used in the same way. Traditionally a "theme" is a set of icons and/or widgets, "skin" is a color scheme. The combination of the two provides look&feel.

The common way to handle themes is to upload a zip files containing the resources that will be unzip into a specific directory of the site structure. The theme usually contains:

• a configuration file
• a collection of stylesheets
• a collection of icons
• a pair of templates: header and footer

Resources for specific modules are structured into directories. 

Joomla! 

<holycow> for joomla 1.0.x it was an xml file plus resource files which were php/html + images + css and you just upload them to a dir and click it on

 http://www.joomla.org/

Drupal

http://drupal.org/ 

moodle

 Themes can be set at different level:

• Site: applied to all pages
• User: applied to all pages, overrides the site one if set in user profile
• Session: applied to all pages, overrides the site and user one
• Course: applied on the course, overrides site, user and session one for the course only. set in the course profile

The priority of the themes can be set/changed using a variable of the configuration.

The theme can be defined as being a "stand-alone" one or extending another one

References:

• http://docs.moodle.org/en/Theme_settings
• http://moodle.org/ 

ATutor 

http://www.atutor.ca/ 

What is an acs-theme?

References are based on OpenACS version 5.4.2 and early 5.5.0d 

In OpenACS context, a "theme" can be defined as a composition of:

• templates: for the organization of the information
• stylesheets: for layout and skinning
• icons: graphic representation of common actions and entities (see acs-kernel.common_* message keys)
• widgets: WYSIWYG HTML editor ???

Templates

This is a list of the templates that can be set using parameters: 

• master template: acs-subsite, section Main
  • DefaultMaster
• list template:
  • acs-templating, section Main:
  • • DefaultListFilterStyle (misnamed since it's not a style but a template)
    • DefaultListStyle
  • acs-subsite, section Main
    • DefaultListStyle
• form template:
  • acs-templating, section Main
  • • DefaultFormStyle
  • acs-subsite, section Main
    • DefaultFormStyle
• others:
  • acs-subsite, section Templates
    • LoginTemplate
    • UserHomeTemplate
    • UserInfoTemplate
    • UserNewTemplate
  • acs-subsite, section Main
    • EmailConfirmTemplate

Stylesheets

Currently stylesheets are hard-coded. A few individual applications (e.g. calendar, forums) have their  own stylesheets.

Icons

Same. Icons are hard-coded. 

Widgets

The HTML editor is set in acs-templating using the following parameters:

• RichTextEditor
• XinhaDefaultPlugins

Scenarios 

Facebook-like site (holycow) - per subsite

Users with specific needs - per user

Requirements

*** ROUGH DRAFT of random ideas ***

- managing icons relies on a strict convention for paths and filenames

- a theme can be an extension of an existing one (default one or not), e.g.: high contrast
- a theme can be a "stand-alone" one

- should be able to specify CSS and their order
- should be able to specify the type of the CSSs (alternate or not) and others attributes (media)

- a package should be able to register its individual CSS for one theme

- a skin can be paired to a theme, in this case it should include the image directory with the icons files.

- the theme can be chosen at subsite level
- user must be able to choose her theme, in this case it overrides the subsite one

- theme-manager should provide or comes along with a default theme