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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 03:30:45PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> >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.
> 
> Having sidetracked things this far, I may as well plunge ahead with more 
> potentially divergent comments ...
> 
> By having "skin-invariant places for *actions*", I presume what is meant is 
> a way of allowing admins to code a simple skin and somehow include action 
> buttons via a name, the name being (perhaps) a wiki page.

Yes and no.  The original request (and the other side of this) was/is
to make it possible to have a central place for the admin to specify
the action buttons, and let the skin specify where/how that list should
be displayed.

> Being a self-confessed  CSS ignoramus, I find anything that allows me to 
> tailor the look of my pages without getting out a hex-editor is welcome 
> indeed. In my ignorance, I probably mix content and structure, but I want 
> what I want (or need) and I get it using the path of least resistance in 
> most cases.

I believe in taking whatever-path-reaches-the-goal.  :-)  It's great 
if we can make the path of least resistance one in which content and
structure are nicely separated, but so far the tools at our disposal
(XHTML+CSS and current browser implementations) don't facilitate this.

> I guess what I really want is to be able to have the equivalent of the 
> SideBar for all the page edges. The SideBar I understood as soon as I saw 
> it. Looking inside PmWiki.css and PmWiki.tmpl made my head hurt, and I 
> retreated quickly.
> 
> I agree - simplicity is the best choice, and for me that choice ended up 
> being a skin that provided the features I wanted.

...and that's the whole purpose of PmWiki being "skinnable", to
make a lot of paths with less resistance.  :-)

I think the "waterbed theory" probably applies here, which basically
says that if we make one part of the system simple then we're just
pushing the complexity into other parts of the system.  By making
"common set of actions across multiple skins" simple, we're pushing
the complexity into the skin implementation, and I'm not sure that's 
a tradeoff I want to make.  For a large class of users (notably,
the ones who tend to send me money :-), making it easy to understand
how to create new skins or get a skin to match an existing 
organizational standard is far more important than being able to 
share a common set of actions across multiple skins on a single site.

Pm