6 Jul 2002 dopey   » (Journeyer)

May you live in interesting times - Chinese curse.

Its increasingly obvious to me now why this is a curse.

<person>Dougiamas</person> has a nice codebase, <proj>Moodle</proj> which almost does every thing I need for the subject websites. This is a good thing - its even better that he is interested in taking in some of the patches I make. This is an obvious example of why open source is good, and why it works.

Couple of things I'd like to change are to make it more suited to our site - different access levels, standardized dates for subjects - and to make it more customisable.

Customization is tickling at me - I know its not essential to getting the site working for now, so I should be able to leave it for now and work on more urgent things, but its just nigling at me. I'm thinking of changing the theme system to allow customisation of more than just some of the colours, the header and the footer - however, most of the template systems that I've seen that allow you to do this suck.

I'm now thinking of using HTML::Template's port/conversion, called htmltmpl to have a stab at this. htmltmpl is nice, and I'm thinking of having a template for each type of `object' - sidebox, information, calendar, etc - and another template for the complete page (including the header and footer).

This may make it slightly more difficult for a designer to wrap their head around, but it'll allow one hell of a lot more customisation to the interface, which I believe is a good thing.

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