[ php-blog-Feature Requests-1573843 ] Full Smarty Support for the Admin Interface

Feature Requests item #1573843, was opened at 2006-10-09 16:02
Message generated for change (Settings changed) made by garvinhicking
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Category: Interface Improvements
>Group: Future Release
Status: Open
>Priority: 2
Submitted By: Mark Koopmann (mark9000)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Full Smarty Support for the Admin Interface

Initial Comment:
It would be very useful, if we could use Smarty 
Templates for the complete admin interface. 

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>Comment By: Garvin Hicking (garvinhicking)
Date: 2006-10-09 18:21

Message:
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Hi!

Thanks for your request, but I must tell you that this
feature is not likely to get implemented any soon because of
several reasons (in no specific order):

1. It would take a few weeks to re-code everything in the
admin panel

2. It would make several things much harder, because we have
to face that Smarty is not as flexible as PHP, and that the
admin area heavily relies on many PHP output filters and
mixed PHP/output control that cannot be so easily seperated
without introducing much lower performance or
duplicate/hardto maintain code

3. It makes adding features to the admin area much harder,
because template authors would need to create new templates
for every s9y version. This is not so hard on the frontend,
because many features on the frontend get added via plugins
and are solidated during the past years.

4. It introduces a new point of failure. Often people
complain about their frontend not working because they have
misconfigured their paths, changed to a different server,
have non-writable "templates_c" directoriesor other user
errors. The forums are actually full of those, and they
cannot be circumvented by different coding. The upside was
that those people could always still access the admin area;
if that were smarty-templated, the error would also show up
in the admin and effectively lock them out and make them
resort to tools like phpMyAdmin.


To wrap it up, templating the admin introduces huge
barrieres for a feature-driven future of Serendipity, and it
makes development on the admin harder in terms of
ease-of-code. Of course I see the upside of it, that people
could make things more flexible. So the route we try to go
(like with the template-driven new 1.1 media manager) is to
add new features a sub-templates, if possible. 

The "edit entry" section is also likely to get Smartified,
because this is the most important place where people would
like to modify things. For other parts, we would like to
better resort to providing a good XHTML source so that
people could use CSS for all customization needs.

Maybe, if you have other precise suggestions on how to
implement it, I would like your feedback of course.:-)

Bestregards,
Garvin

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