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

[Zbigniew Lukasiak]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 9:55 PM, Gunnar Strand<gunnarstrand at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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? ;-)

I am working on CatalystX::Elements with the first one being Comments
- I am not sure if it goes in the same direction - but it seems close.
  The main goal is providing Catalyst feature addons - that could be
used as kind of scaffolding - that is they should be easy to assemble,
implying they are rather simplistic, and later easy to be gradually
replaced.  For now I am not dealing with templates at all - the
Comments element lets you to stash a form which knows how to render
itself into HTML and can be inserted somewhere in the templates.
I've posted about it at my blog:
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/2009/06/catalystxcomments-rfc.html
(also have a look at the comment).  There is some code for it at:
http://github.com/gshank/ravlog/tree/8b7ec1493324212cde91927c15fc54cd2c9db25d/lib/CatalystX
(but now I've decided to change the name and add Elements - a play on
the chemical metaphor of Catalyst).


-- 
Zbigniew Lukasiak
http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/
http://perlalchemy.blogspot.com/