[Catalyst] Themes, skins, templates and componentized UI?

[Gunnar Strand]

Hi,

I am a little new in the web design area. I'm trying to design an 
application where the "view" part must be simple to replace by whomever 
installs it, with elements of their own design. This would work 
comparable to "themes" or "skins". I've done some googling, but I 
haven't got any obvious hits on this. The closest I _think_ is 
"CatalystX::Usul", but I haven't really understood if that's what I'm 
looking for :-)

Also, I would also want the person installing the application to be able 
to restructure the visual parts using "components", where a component 
could for instance be a "result ticker", "main menu", "member table" or 
such. Perhaps in the way that Joomla does, but the components will be 
application specific. It's much a matter of deciding what components are 
present in which views and where.

I imagine, for instance, a collection of widgets (button, 
drop-down-list, text field etc) which are reused in the TT templates. A 
component would then use these widgets as building blocks, populating 
them using data from the stash. A "view" (webpage) would be a template 
including one or more of these components. A theme could then override 
any widgets of choice to change the look-and-feel of the whole 
application instantly.

Am I approaching this from the right direction and does anyone know if 
there exists a framework similar to this to use with Catalyst?

Or should I perhaps go barking up the TT tree? ;-)

KR,
Gunnar