[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] Making it easier to customize XWiki for public web sites

Hello devs, When we are using XWiki for public web sites, most of the time we want to hide some elements in the UI for guest users (and sometimes for authenticated users as well). Currently, it's not elegant to do so : either we have to create a custom skin, override a couple of templates (with all the merging nightmare it bringd when upgrading the wiki) - either we create a SSX to "hide" visually elements. None of those solutions are really satisfactory. The first one is painful, the second one is only a workaround and can be a pain too (there is no way currently to use a SSX "under certain conditions") Before we can handle all this nicely using Interface eXtensions, I propose to make couple of light changes to some templates to make our life easier : 1) Add 4 variables in layoutvars.vm : * $displayContentMenu // display or not the content menu (view, edit links, etc.) true by default * $displayMainMenu // display or not the main menu (wiki and space links, user profile) true by default * $displayDocExtra // display or not the tabs with doc extra links (comments, attachments, etc.) true by default * $displayShortcuts // display or not the document shortcuts (those are in the line written under the document title) (this is XWIKI-4394 "Allow some UI elements not to be displayed by setting a variable") 2) Add a "extravars.vm" template that remains empty by default. This will allow to override values from xwikivars/layoutvars without the need to override them (and introducing the merging pain upon upgrade). (this is XWIKI-4927 "We need a way to be able to override variables from xwikivars.vm / layoutvars.vm without overriding these templates") Please let me know what you think, I would like to move forward with this during 2.3 Thanks, Jerome.