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Re: Themeing G3
by Bharat Mediratta
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Stephen Cupp wrote:
> Who is G3 aimed at? Those people that know how to theme in WP and
> Drupal will want to run G3 embedded and just want the basic HTML so it
> doesn't break their WP or Drupal theme.
>
> It is my view that decisions like this are made by the developers who
> didn't wrap their heads around what the users needs are. Unless you are
> subscribed to this list you have no idea what's going on. Maybe I
> missed it, but have the developers asked the rest of the community what
> they want. I haven't seen any polls or forum topics or a survey. When
> I look through the Theme Development Forum I see questions like "Carbon
> Theme: changing logo" or "Carbon Theme: how to change the logo link?".
> Are these the people who are going to think PHP is better then Smarty?
> Now I'm not trying to be harsh because sometimes I fall into this
> trap too. Those that know PHP will think a pure PHP themeing system is
> the best. Those who don't know PHP is another story.
Stephen, I'm not going to take offense that you're basically saying that
I don't understand our user base. I don't think that a poll is an
appropriate way to figure out a solution for something like this. We
made a measured decision based on a variety of criteria.
1) It's 1 less technology to learn. We expect that themers will know
some PHP, or have to learn it. Even with Smarty templates, they still
needed to know a *little* PHP. And if they don't know either Smarty or
PHP then they need to learn one thing either way. It just needs to be
well documented and easy (which is achievable in either case).
2) PHP templates are fast and commonly used. Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress,
PHP-Nuke, and others follow this paradigm. This demonstrates that
there's a large and thriving base of people who know how to use PHP to
create themes. Taking a survey is not the way to make a clear decision.
We're doing this for technical reasons and we believe that it'll be at
least as easy to understand to the themer as Smarty is.
3) I have personally spent a huge amount of time trying to create a good
metaphor for template layers like Smarty on top of our existing system
and I've found that this additional layer is slow and confusing. It
requires a compilation phase, generates new PHP files off in an
unexpected location, leads to permission errors that cause rendering to
fail, requires the reader to go off and read and understand the Smarty
documentation to do anything more complicated than variable
interpolation, and has confusing error messages.
4) Smarty's choice of tag delimiters interfere with two of the most
common and basic operations that themers want: using curly braces in CSS
and Javascript.
So PHP is faster, smaller, better known.
> I'm also skeptical about the documentation for this new themeing system.
> As I've said here numerous times I feel that is G2's biggest weak
> point. Bharat told me he didn't like to write documentation and no
> amount of wishing is going to change that. He also said he wanted to
> write G3 in a way so there is not a need for much documentation.
Ok, I hear what you're saying. But hear this: a new theming system is
coming. If you'd like the documentation to be better this time around,
how about you take charge of the theming documentation effort and we
work together on it? I'll answer every single one of your questions for
you in as much detail as you can handle, you are in charge of getting it
down in a form that people understand. You'll also be in charge of
following through on it and not taking off in the middle of the project.
Step up and get involved and you can make a difference here. Otherwise,
while I appreciate your skepticism, it's not going to change the outcome.
-Bharat
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> Who is G3 aimed at? Those people that know how to theme in WP and
> Drupal will want to run G3 embedded and just want the basic HTML so it
> doesn't break their WP or Drupal theme.
>
> It is my view that decisions like this are made by the developers who
> didn't wrap their heads around what the users needs are. Unless you are
> subscribed to this list you have no idea what's going on. Maybe I
> missed it, but have the developers asked the rest of the community what
> they want. I haven't seen any polls or forum topics or a survey. When
> I look through the Theme Development Forum I see questions like "Carbon
> Theme: changing logo" or "Carbon Theme: how to change the logo link?".
> Are these the people who are going to think PHP is better then Smarty?
> Now I'm not trying to be harsh because sometimes I fall into this
> trap too. Those that know PHP will think a pure PHP themeing system is
> the best. Those who don't know PHP is another story.
Stephen, I'm not going to take offense that you're basically saying that
I don't understand our user base. I don't think that a poll is an
appropriate way to figure out a solution for something like this. We
made a measured decision based on a variety of criteria.
1) It's 1 less technology to learn. We expect that themers will know
some PHP, or have to learn it. Even with Smarty templates, they still
needed to know a *little* PHP. And if they don't know either Smarty or
PHP then they need to learn one thing either way. It just needs to be
well documented and easy (which is achievable in either case).
2) PHP templates are fast and commonly used. Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress,
PHP-Nuke, and others follow this paradigm. This demonstrates that
there's a large and thriving base of people who know how to use PHP to
create themes. Taking a survey is not the way to make a clear decision.
We're doing this for technical reasons and we believe that it'll be at
least as easy to understand to the themer as Smarty is.
3) I have personally spent a huge amount of time trying to create a good
metaphor for template layers like Smarty on top of our existing system
and I've found that this additional layer is slow and confusing. It
requires a compilation phase, generates new PHP files off in an
unexpected location, leads to permission errors that cause rendering to
fail, requires the reader to go off and read and understand the Smarty
documentation to do anything more complicated than variable
interpolation, and has confusing error messages.
4) Smarty's choice of tag delimiters interfere with two of the most
common and basic operations that themers want: using curly braces in CSS
and Javascript.
So PHP is faster, smaller, better known.
> I'm also skeptical about the documentation for this new themeing system.
> As I've said here numerous times I feel that is G2's biggest weak
> point. Bharat told me he didn't like to write documentation and no
> amount of wishing is going to change that. He also said he wanted to
> write G3 in a way so there is not a need for much documentation.
Ok, I hear what you're saying. But hear this: a new theming system is
coming. If you'd like the documentation to be better this time around,
how about you take charge of the theming documentation effort and we
work together on it? I'll answer every single one of your questions for
you in as much detail as you can handle, you are in charge of getting it
down in a form that people understand. You'll also be in charge of
following through on it and not taking off in the middle of the project.
Step up and get involved and you can make a difference here. Otherwise,
while I appreciate your skepticism, it's not going to change the outcome.
-Bharat
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge
Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes
Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world
http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/
__[ g a l l e r y - d e v e l ]_________________________
[ list info/archive --> http://gallery.sf.net/lists.php ]
[ gallery info/FAQ/download --> http://gallery.sf.net ]
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