Feature Proposal: Add a Skin Directory to the Default Template Path

Motivation

Prevent the clutter in the templates directory, and to ease the life of skin developers that use BuildContrib and pseudo-install.pl (as skins are stored in a subfolder, there is no need to regenerate the MANIFEST during development).

Description and Documentation

Add the paths $TWiki::cfg{TemplateDir}/$skin/name.tmpl and $TWiki::cfg{TemplateDir}/$skin/$web/name.tmpl to the default TemplatePath

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: RafaelAlvarez - 06 Oct 2008

Discussion

um, please do not change things to not need a MANIFEST listing all files. Its extremely painful to try to verify a release if you don't have a list of what files are intended to be in that release.

-- SvenDowideit - 06 Oct 2008

My main driver is to reduce the clutter in the templates directory by having the skins contained in subdirectories. The other part is a side effect.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 07 Oct 2008

i agree - but its a bad side effect that needs to be avoided - personally, I'd much rather each skin was in a separate directory too.

-- SvenDowideit - 07 Oct 2008

To prevent the "bad side" we can modify BuildContrib to check the manifest for correctness before packaging the extension.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 07 Oct 2008

BuildContrib should already only include files specifically mentioned in the MANIFEST - at least thats what I thought it did...

-- SvenDowideit - 08 Oct 2008

Sven, you're right about that. I was thinking along the lines of having target that verity that MANIFEST contains all the files in the extension directory. Anyway, this is orthogonal to the TemplatePath proposal.

-- RafaelAlvarez - 08 Oct 2008

thats what I think too - when you amend the proposal, refactor this discussion

-- SvenDowideit - 09 Oct 2008

I support the idea of RafaelAlvarez, this is good idea. Every skin should have separate template directory and one default template location/directory to fall back if there are issue with skin setup.

-- SopanShewale - 06 Jan 2009

Decided at HelsinkiReleaseMeeting2009x04x20 to park this proposal until skin creation architecture has been reviewed. See SimplifySkinCreation.

-- PeterThoeny - 2009-04-20

Does %TMPL:INCLUDE{"name.otherskin"}% still work in this case if the skins are in subdirectories? I use this feature all over the place to include stuff from the pattern skin into other skins.

-- PeterNixon - 2009-09-14