[xwiki-devs] [Proposal] New Best Practices in the App Guide

Hi devs, Following a discussion at http://jira.xwiki.org/browse/XWIKI-12327# I’d like to propose to add this new best practice in the App Guide, i.e. at http://platform.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/DevGuide/BestPractices Rule: Do not use Skin-specific resources in Extensions/Applications Rationale: If you do, then your Extension/Application will only work for that Skin. When the default skin in XWiki is modified, your Extension/Application will stop to work fine. Example: This is what happened in apps like in the Forum app which was using: getSkinFile(“noavatar.png”) where “noavatar.png” was a Colibri-skin resource only. The Forum app was broken when we moved to Flamingo and the Forum app had to be modified to use getSkinFile("icons/xwiki/noavatar.png”) which is better since it’s a global resource, thus available to all Skins (see https://github.com/xwiki-contrib/application-forum/commit/3d3a99e5665265607…). WDYT? Anyone disagree? I’d like to clos this topic quickly so that we can close XWIKI-12327. Thanks -Vincent PS: Additional idea (I don’t know if it’s feasible): I wonder if we could even prevent getSkinFile() to return a skin-specific resource if the originating code is not from a resource from this Skin or if the originating code is not located in a Children Skin (i.e. a skin css, skin jss or skin vm). i.e. consider that skin-specific resources have a private access level.