[Grok-dev] Re: Skinning/themeing

[Martin Aspeli]

Martijn Faassen wrote:

> What I was thinking about is a design similar to XSLT templating (not 
> rules-based XSLT).
> 
> You'd have theme.pt. Or theme.genshi, or whatever. All these templating 
> languages need to be supplied with a way to get information from xpath 
> expressions.
 >
> Then you write a match view that matches the whole dynamically rendered 
> page. In the theme template, you use xpath expressions to fish out the 
> bits from the dynamically rendered page and pull it into the layout.

That's basically Deliverance's model, yes.

> This can be combined with smaller rules where bits of pages are 
> manipulated. XSLT offers both ways as well - rule based transformation 
> and template-based transformation, and combinations thereof. I am just 
> trying to think of a way that allows this kind of pattern with other 
> templating languages.
> 
> If I understand Martin correctly about deliverance, what deliverance 
> offers beyond this is cleaner themes that just contain ids.

Deliverance is XSLT-like and xpath-based. I think our thoughts here are 
converging, and we're basically just down to a discussion on which 
patterns to promote, and how to promote them.

> Replicating 
> this would require a different approach where the static HTML is being 
> matched (on an id basis at least) as well, as Lennart describes.

Come to think of it, another benefit of Deliverance used in an 
out-of-process fashion, or as WSGI filter, is that you can have common 
look-and-feel across different things. For example, you could apply a 
theme to both phpBB and Plone and a small Grok app. The OpenPlans guys 
are doing stuff like that with custom Pylons apps, for example.

Martin