[Repoze-checkins] r697 - www/trunk/blog.repoze.org/entries

[Paul Everitt]

Author: Paul Everitt <paul at agendaless.com>
Date: Mon Feb 18 13:56:34 2008
New Revision: 697

Log:
First shot.


Added:
   www/trunk/blog.repoze.org/entries/why-sitetheming-1-20080214.txt

Added: www/trunk/blog.repoze.org/entries/why-sitetheming-1-20080214.txt
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+Plone Sitetheming Part 1: Why Not
+#label deliverance
+
+<p>At the Plone Strategic Planning Summit, I signed up for work on <a
+href="http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/7852">Promote Deliverance as
+the branding/"corporate ID" mechanism</a>. In the next series of blog
+posts, I'll try to cover the why, the what, and the how. Before
+beginning, though, I'd like to be up-front about some of the "why not
+to go in this direction."</p>
+
+<p>This ticket is about putting a site's common look-and-feel on each
+page. For the moment, I'll call this step "sitetheming".  Should we
+have a special, simple facility for just this audience (integrators,
+entry-level Plone customizers) and activity?</p>
+
+<p>However, not all will agree on the basic premise, so I'd like to
+anticipate some of these concerns up-front. If any of this sounds like
+you, please speak up during this process. The goal is to make
+something uniquely useful and simple for the non-core-developer
+audience. We certainly don't want to do something that you won't
+like!</p>
+
+<p>(If you simply must read more about site themes, here is <a
+href="http://wiki.zope.org/zope3/SiteThemes">a writeup</a> I made long
+ago on the Zope wiki and here is the <a
+href="http://www.openplans.org/projects/deliverance/project-home">introduction
+to Deliverance</a>. Alternatively, wait until my next few posts.)</p>
+
+<h2>Why Not</h2>
+
+<ol>
+
+<li><em>Plone 2.5 and/or Plone 3.0 is easy enough to theme</em>. Falls
+into the "ain't broke, don't fix it" category.  My sense is that
+"theming is hard" is a common complaint by the target audience, but
+perhaps I'm mis-reading the tea leaves.</li>
+
+<li><em>It's hard, but worth it.</em> Currently,
+theming/skinning/templating/programming are all part of the same
+facility. This lets you do just about anything.  Creating an isolated,
+stripped-down "theme engine" thus breaks that proposition.</li>
+
+<li><em>I'm both the developer and the UI person.</em> If you're
+mostly a developer who also does the UI, you might not want to learn a
+new facility, as you're still going to be the person doing the page
+content generation.</li>
+
+<li><em>People will invariably stray over the line.</em> We always
+encourage a clear line between presentation and content.  However, the
+moment you have something straddling the line (e.g. the contents of a
+calenar portlet), that discipline feels restraining.</li>
+
+<li><em>I'll never have non-Plone.</em> As part of this proposal, we'd
+like to encourage moving stuff out the Zope stack, allowing it to be
+applied across other Python stuff. However, that might not be your
+itch.  Having a corporate ID that could be used with other Plone apps,
+or potentitally non-Plone apps, might not be a meaningful upside for
+you.</li>
+
+<li><em>Plone needs to stop changing.</em> Integrators, and even some
+core Plone folks, are feeling bumfuzzled by all the machinery
+changes. They've reached their absorption limit. Thus, it wouldn't
+matter if there <em>was</em> a problem, nor if this was a good
+solution.  It's a new way to do old stuff, and that's bad on the face
+of it.</li>
+
+</ol>
+
+<p>That's some of what I'm hearing so far.  Before we get into the
+details of what's on the table, who should care, and even how we can
+minimize these points, I want to make sure I'm listening to the
+integrators and entry folks. Any other concerns about this proposal in
+particular, or the strategic planning summit in general?</p>
+
+<p> - Paul </p>
+
+