[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] A new mechanism to overwrite a skin file

Hello. This proposal is about the following issue: http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11803. Currently, our mechanism to overwrite a skin file in the wiki has some problems: 1 - we need to add a property in the XWiki.XWikiSkins class for every file that we want to overwrite. It is not clean to change a system class just to use a feature. Moreover, all the existing skins are polluted with any new property added to the class, even if the skin does not need it. 2 - we cannot overwrite a file placed in a subdirectory (like "less/style.less.vm") since we cannot have the "/" character in a property name. This blocks http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-11394. To avoid the problem 1, people usually attach their overwriting files to the skin documents. But it causes some other problems: it is not the wiki spirit to edit a file locally and then to upload it. It would be far better to edit the code directly in a textarea. To fix these 2 problems, I propose a new mechanism, that Eddy have described previously [1]: * we create a new XClass called XWiki.XWikiSkinFileOverride. * this class would contain 2 properties: ** a path (eg: htmlheaders.vm, less/buttons.less...) ** a content (a textarea). Then, on the skin document, we add one XObject per file that we want to overwrite. The system is simple and flexible. (On the future, we can even imagine that XWiki automatically merges the content of the XObject with the existing file in the skin, but this idea is not a part of this proposal.) Depending on the time I will have, I may not be able to fully implement this for 7.0. So I plan to make it work for the LESS files first, that we cannot overwrite currently. Here is my +1, Thanks [1] http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-10568?focusedCommentId=81939&page=co… -- Guillaume Delhumeau (gdelhumeau(a)xwiki.com) Research & Development Engineer at XWiki SAS Committer on the XWiki.org project