Themes should be more customizable

[pilone]

Hi there,

i've been working on an installation of OCS as a trial for several days now and I am not convinced by the customizability of the themes. I've come to an end of the possibilities of the ocs-theme-management as you can only change stylesheets but not the actual HTML-structure. As this was not sufficient, i just changed all the template files. However this has lead to a point were I was looking forward to an update of OCS (because of the Time Block Bug) but how to update an installation were you have customized a lot of the core-template-files.

My point is, it would be a real improvement if the system would let you create HTML-Templates which are independent of the core-programming. Something you can put into a template directory and than select from a form in the site-management. These would therefore be more independent from updating processes. I think wordpress, joomla and other blogsoftware/content management systems do it this way. I will be sitting here and make a list of dozens of files i changed, so i can put them back after updating.

I'm sorry I'm not a native speaker, I hope I could somehow give you a glimpse of what my intention is here.

Best wishes,
Stephan

[asmecher]

Hi Stephan,

Theming is a long-time frustration with OJS and OCS. We're working on some much cleaner structures (first in OMP, and eventually porting them back to OJS and OCS) but those won't be available for some time. In the meantime, it's OK to modify the templates -- if you're familiar with the standard GNU diff/patch tools, you can use these to ensure that your customizations are preserved when you upgrade.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

[pilone]

Hey, thanks for your reply. I am not yet familiar with the GNU Tools. Will see if I'll need them.

I got another problem in the meantime. While I'm restructuring the templates quite a bit, i'd like to be able to comment code out, without using the HTML Version <!-- ... --> and thereby producing a lot of unecessary code in the frontend. Obviously I don't want to delete anything from the original templates (I'm too lazy too get backup copies of the ... well lets just say i'd like to do it this way). Is there a way to comment code out of the dynamic stuff in the templates, something like

Code: Select all

<div id="content">
{/*include file="common/navbar.tpl"*/}

{include file="common/breadcrumbs.tpl"}

<h2>{$pageTitleTranslated}</h2>

so that the Navbar is not visible anymore?

Best regards,
Stephan

[asmecher]

Hi Stephan,

Yes -- have a look at the Smarty template engine's documentation for all the options, but briefly, you can use {* and *} for comments.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team