On Apr 24, 2008, at 3:36 PM, Sergiu Dumitriu wrote:
Jerome Velociter wrote:
> Dear devs,
>
> In XWS 1.0, I've tried to make the product work with every skin we
> package
> with XE, in addition to XWS own skin ("workspaces"). For this, I
> placed
> several velocity files in the templates/ folder of the product
> webapp, for
> them to be available for every skin (for example, workspace.vm
> which is
> use as a "defaultTemplate" for workspaces home pages, or
> xwsmacros.vm
> which hold workspaces macros). I realized recently it's not proper
> solution, as it does alter a directory which is supposed to be
> common for
> every products, and it makes it harder to install properly XWS over
> an
> existing XE, or sharing XWS and XE instances in a XEM context.
>
> Put simple, I could not find a nice way of having both :
>
> 1) XWS not being intrusive in the webapp, apart from its skin
> 2) Workspaces work with every skin
>
> As for now, I consider 1) being more important than 2), and I see
> more use
> cases for it. So for XWS 1.1, I will remove the overriding
> templates/
> folder by moving its velocity files in the workspaces skin. This
> will then
> break point 2).
>
> Are there any other solutions to reconcile both points I didn't
> see ?
Yes, Template Extensions (proposal pending, 30% written already).
However, it will take some time until that will be coded, so it is
something for the future. For now, I'd stick with the altered
/templates/ directory.
That currently doesn't work with 1.4...
You refer to the hardcoded macros.vm lookup by the new velocity
engine ?
If so you suggested the ant task that would append xws macros to
/templates/macros.vm at build time, but I must admit I don't like it
since
it would make installing XWS manually even harder.
What if we would be able to define foldback paths for filesystem
skins ?
Could that be a functionality of the SkinManager component you are
writing, or this has nothing to do ?