[Mailman-Developers] Templating the interface

[Barry Warsaw]

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On May 1, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Aaron Crosman wrote:

>> From my reading of the responses to my question I see two ways that
> people are thinking of proceeding, which I think might complement each
> other well.
>
> First, there's the approach of fixing the current pages by moving the
> style information out of the Python code and into a CSS file.  Second,
> there's the more extensive work to switch to a proper templating  
> system
> like Genshi.  I think in the long run, getting all the XHTML into
> external files is where the project should go.

Totally agreed.  One of the design goals of the trunk is to allow  
people to run Mailman without the web u/i, e.g. driven by Zope, TG,  
Django, etc.  Once I get a little farther with my SQLAlchemy/Elixir  
branch, the next thing I'm going to do is egg-ify the code.  I  
desperately want to get rid of configure.

> That will give users the
> most freedom to redesign how they see fit (good design of the default
> templates would still have that be styled using CSS), but it looks  
> like
> there are a lot of work to make good progress in that area.  I'd  
> like to
> suggest a mixed approach.  If we started to working fixing the 2.1
> branch to have better output (even if it's never properly released),
> that would allow some people to do useful work while Barry firms up  
> the
> trunk and we make a final choice of a templating engine. Once a  
> template
> engine is inserted, that improved output could serve as the basis for
> the first templates for the system.  Also, while we're finding a
> changing the HTML in the current python code, we could mark that  
> code to
> be easy to find later.
>
> We also need to attend to the "creaky decade-old look", but I would
> suggest that really be taken on as part of the work to move to a real
> template system, not as part of picking off the low hanging fruit.

Agreed.

- -Barry

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