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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 01:33:12PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> 
> When I first started using PmWiki, I had never used any PHP and my HTML 
> experience was limited to whatever Dreamweaver or Golive could provide to 
> me with a nice interface. (Forget CSS!!) 

Yes, what you're describing is my prototypical wikiadmin.  (See
PmWiki.Audiences :-).

> [...]
> But as I said later, all I want is an easy way to control 
> the look of the pages and the placement of items in the menu/action lists 
> without having to crack open .css or .tmpl files.

For completeness, would it be fair to change this last part to...?

   ...without having to crack open .css or .tmpl files, or write
   anything more complex than simple PHP variable assignments.

I'm becoming more convinced that a wikipage-based action list is
probably the way for us to go here, especially if we have an easy 
way for a skin designer to grab the links out of the page so they 
can be restructured into a different HTML structure.  Our 
directives then start to look like:

    The default:
        <!--wiki:Main.ActionList-->                      
    Group-custom actions with a "Main" default:
        <!--wiki:$Group.ActionList Main.ActionList-->    
    Skin-specific complex action processing:
        <!--function:SkinActionSlicerDicer Main.ActionList-->

If we really need recipes to be able to programatically add custom 
actions into the mix, perhaps it can be done with a special markup 
on the ActionList pages, or some variant of (:include:).

Pm