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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 02:29:23PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2005-04-05  12:29 PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >What if there are two bars?  See, for example,
> >http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Zen/TopBar, in which there is a top bar
> >and a separate area for action links.  If we go with the idea that
> >action links belong in a wiki page, we need a name other than TopBar.
> 
> I don't find the Zen example to be particularly user friendly, but then it 
> is, perhaps, just an example of how many ways there are to provide menus. 

It also depends on how you characterize "users".

> In this case they are:
> 1) the left side bar
> 2) the topmost page-wide bar
> 3) the second level action tabs
> 4) the third level drop down in what looks like the page body (These don't 
> work very well in Firefox)

No, that's an artifact of being on the "TopBar" page itself, which
defines the menus for #2 (the topmost page-wide bar).  I probably 
should've sent people to http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Zen/HomePage 
as the example.

> Since admins can add as many bars et alia as they wish, why not establish 
> the minimal standard set for PmWiki as four "bars" (call them what you 
> will) at the top, bottom, left and right. They would each be populated from 
> a PmWiki page, or omitted if the page was absent (or if suitable 
> conditional code was present).

Except how does this resolve the original purpose of this thread, 
which was to have skin-invariant places for *actions*?  Just saying
we'll allow top/bottom/left/right bars seems to have totally sidetracked
this issue, which just shows that admin preferences aren't all that
uniform, no?  When there's little uniformity, simplicity (with guidelines
to the available "complex" choices) is probably best.

Pm