Re: Flavours and templates

On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 12:13:04PM -0500, will kahn-greene wrote:
> > Yes, I hear what you're saying.  However from the *users* point of
> > view changing what a browser sees (i.e. different HTML templates) is
> > not the same sort of animal as changing the output format (i.e. HTML
> > or RSS or text or whatever).
> >
> > I think (maybe I'm wrong) that most people will be interested in
> > changing what they see in their browser, i.e. they want to output
> > 'different HTML' and the documentation doesn't really address this
> > requirement directly.
> 
> I fully expect PyBlosxom users to be technically oriented.  As such, I 
> fully believe that users ARE developers and vice versa.  For people that 
> don't fit in this group, I encourage them in the documentation and 
> elsewhere on the site to look at other blog systems since PyBlosxom 
> isn't going to work for them at this time.
> 
Well I'm definitely a developer/techie, I've been working
professionally as a programmer since the early 1970s.  I'm most
certainly not a Web/HTML guru though, most of my work has been in low
level (assembler) programming on microprocessors and more recently C
and Java comms programming on Sun Solaris systems.  I'm mostly retired
now. 


> Having said that, output is output is output.  So I don't think I agree 
> with the this.
> 
> I'm interested in hearing other peoples' point of view.  Is this too 
> complicated for technical people?  Is there a better way to distill it 
> down?  (patches against svn trunk accepted!)
> 

[snip lots more discussion]

I think my fundamental problem is that some/most of the flavours in
the flavour registry don't work as supplied so they don't provide
working examples to aid understanding the documentation.

Going through them we have:-

    1024px - This does actually work if you simply unpack it in the
    flavours directory and set the default flavour to 1024px.  It
    doesn't actually say this in the README.txt file though although
    it outlines lots of other things you need to do.

    Blue and blue - this unpacks to a directory called template in
    which it places flavour/template files with a .html suffix.  So to
    make it work you have either to replace the default html flavour
    with it or you have to give it a different flavour name.

    Gray - this unpacks to a directory called pyblosxom-gray, same
    requirements as for Blue and blue.

    Mainly Green - actually extracts to a directory called html.flav
    but then the content_type.html is missing so it fails for another
    reason. 

If Blue and blue, Gray and Mainly Green all did the same thing (i.e.
either extract to html.flav *or* extract to abcd.flav and have .abcd
template suffixes) it would be much easier to use the above to help
follow the documentation.

A working example (for me at least) is worth a thousand words of
documentation, if one could just install one of the flavours, do what
it says in its README file and have a working flavour that really
would be all that's necessary I think (at least I'd have had less
trouble!).

I'm quite happy to put some time into doing minor fixes to the
flavours and adding to/changing the README files.

... and thank you Will for continuing to maintain pyblosxom and
listening to my ramblings patiently.  :-)

-- 
Chris Green


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