[Grok-dev] Re: Skinning/themeing

[Martin Aspeli]

Lennart Regebro wrote:

> Sure: http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/grok-dev/2007-March/000476.html

I see! This looks very powerful and cool.

I assume we are still considering viewlets as the way of making 
"pluggable" UIs, i.e. aspects of a page where you can plug in new 
elements without modifying the view, and where you can vary the thing 
being plugged in by context type.

Or are we thinking this is the general approach to page composition?

Also I'm not convinced that it solves the general themeing/branding 
problem. The premise of Deliverance (or something like it) is that the 
designer (be he the same or a different person to the one doing the 
compositing and the raw development) makes a full, flat, static HTML 
page (or pages) which defines "the way it should look", and then pulls 
the relevant parts of the "composed" page into the correct parts that 
static page. That allows them to use familiar tools (e.g. Dreamweaver) 
and design a "whole" into which the application slots.

The match approach described in the email above, as I understand it, is 
about defining a pipeline which post-processes the "bits" of a page 
(which is of course useful for all kinds of things). It works the 
opposite way to Deliverance, in that you start with a "composed" set of 
markup and then selectively swap out bits of it. I can't see how someone 
wearing ad designer hat would make lots of these little match classes 
and template snippets to theme a page.

Martin