[Seaside] importance of templates?

Julian Fitzell julian@beta4.com
Mon, 20 May 2002 11:29:37 -0000


Yes, even though we haven't used it yet, I'd be pretty reluctant to let the
templates go.  The reason we haven't used it is that we're doing our own
graphical design.  And even with CSS, there are lots of browsers that don't
support it completely... designers still want to tweak their HTML as they
see fit.  And although we can take that html and change it to work with
Seaside afterward, if they later want to change something we're screwed.

Back to lurking in holiday mode... hopefully the sun will come out soon here
in Ireland... if not, I'll just have to wait until I hit the Mediterranean
:)

Julian

-----Original Message-----
From: Cees de Groot <cg@cdegroot.com>
Newsgroups: lists.squeak.seaside
To: seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org <seaside@lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Date: 20 May 2002 10:08
Subject: Re: [Seaside] importance of templates?


>Avi Bryant <avi@beta4.com> said:
>>One of the major goals of a lot of the work I've done with web tools has
>>been to allow the HTML templates to be as clean and decoupled from the
>>code as possible, so that they can be maintained by a designer
>>independently of the development of the logic.
>>
>I usually let my design guy do his thing in FrontPage, and then take
>the end result and refactor it in headers, footers, etcetera (all in
>VisualWorks SSP). I'm not happy with that, though, because every time my
>marketing-oriented colleagues decide for a new look, I have a lot of work.
>
>On the other hand, one of the things we in particular are offering is
>complete customization for affiliates - they can point to our site in their
>own look-and-feel (which also has all pointers removed to our own site, so
>that we don't appear as a competitor to them). There are two ways to
achieve
>this:
>- Generate components including L&F parameters from a database;
>- Generate components and use stylesheets (be it CSS or XSL).
>As 100% of our affiliates is not stylesheet-savvy, we just decided to move
>away from SSP files and generate all the stuff from Smalltalk.
>
>On the other hand, we host Zope and we do a lot of product development
>in Zope.  For example, we have the "Targeted Marketing Tool", which
>is an expensive name for an opt-in mailing list manager with lots of
>bells'n'whistles. The typical integration work here is that you have 1
>"front-office" page, where users are pointed to from the main website
>or other marketing materials; this page has the subscription form
>and usually must be in the site's look-and-feel. There are a number of
>backoffice pages that customers are happy to have tweaked only w.r.t. the
>color scheme. So you have 1 or 2 pages in which our code must appear,
>for a relatively low-end product the whole refactoring thing is too
>expensive. It would be extremely useful here to have the customer deliver
>one or two templates.
>
>Generally speaking, I think there are two main classes of websites:
>- Content with code embedded;
>- Software.
>Templates seem to be useful to me for the first category.
>
>--
>Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg@cdegroot.com>
>GnuPG 1024D/E0989E8B 0016 F679 F38D 5946 4ECD  1986 F303 937F E098 9E8B
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