[pmwiki-users] Feature request: Action lists in skins

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 01:43:43PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> 
> So it would be best to have the skin just specify where the action list 
> should go, but not specify the actions themselves. 

Alas, I have to disagree here.  The fundamental, underlying
premise of PmWiki's skins is that basic skins should be
easy to design and implement -- i.e., accessible to someone
that doesn't have a lot of PHP knowledge.  I don't want to
add a lot of special *required* hooks and variables that 
become mandatory for any skin or that leaves a novice skin 
designer wondering what will be generated there.

Because there are many different ways in which actions
may be displayed (as a list, via tabs, others), as
well as the fact that different skins may choose to
place some actions in different locations on a page
and not together as a group, I don't think this is something
that can be reliably handled via a simple "place all actions
here" directive.

Compare, for example, the different locations, formatting,
and content of the action list as given by

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/JHSkin
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/AccessKeySkin
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/LightSkin

I don't think they can be easily unified into a single
<!--Actions--> directive.

That said, if skin designers want to create a
<!--function:PrintActions--> convention to display 
the available actions, I'm not opposed -- but I'm not likely
to support it as "the" standard either.

Pm