[Phpgroupware-developers] Re: Class structures & templates (was Re: [Phpgroupware-developers] Filename Standards?)

[Brent Kelly]

Chris Weiss wrote
> What kind of modifications?  Most templates just make changes to the surrounding
> structure and lets the app define how it will look inside that.

Yea, implementing the surrounding template structure went relatively smoothly
- although my template is using a right hand navigation bar which required
a few modifications to the core files as it appears they were hard-coded to
only support top or left hand navigation (calling parse_navbar() directly
after the header).

However implementing the templates into the individual applications was a
bit more fun. Due to the ui class files being centralised in the inc/ directory,
as far as I can tell, your interface is pretty much restricted to the way
the current interface works / is layed out. It would be nice if you were
able to modify the ui code that uses your .tpl files without having to (potentially)
impact other templates for that application.

Anyways, i've heard some whispering about an e-templates system being under
development so hopefully this might add a bit more flexibility in implementing
custom templates :).

> I also recal the used of php file in some of the apps's template dirs, though I don't no if they
> will provide what you are looking for.  IIRC, anglemail does this to handle the
> it's different layouts within the templates.

Yea in the apps i've modified so far, theres been limited support for what
i've described above, with custom head.inc.php files being used (if they
exist) to draw the header for the app etc. Perhaps an example of a simple
implementation allowing a little more flexibility in the user interface would
be to have the ui class methods check the template directories for the existance
of specific files that would be used instead of that function. e.g. for calander.uicalander.month
you could have the month function have a:

if (file_exists($this->template_dir.'/month.inc.php')) {
   include($this->template_dir.'/month.inc.php');
} else {
   //rest of function here
}

That would allow your template to override the month() function by simply
having a month.inc.php file in your template directory. I guess in the end
that would come down to whoever is writing each individual application.

Anyway, just voicing a few thoughts i've had while implementing this new
template :).

Thanks,

Brent Kelly,
Zeald Ltd.