Feature Proposals » Remove inconsistency regarding copyright

Motivation

Pattern Skin ignores a standard template definition of copyright, thus making updating templates confusing.

twiki.tmpl defined a template copyright which is used in standardfooter. This template defines the copyright message.

Pattern Skin does not use standardfooter but uses bottombar instead. However, instead of using copyright as you would imagine, it includes TWiki.WebBottomBar, which then defines the copyright message.

Assuming it is desireable that the WebBottomBar is defined in the TWiki web (which I personally doubt as that web should not be customized, thus making the whole exercise somewhat useless), what one would have expected is that WebBottomBar refers to the copyright template. Instead, it just includes the content of that template literally.

I believe the reason for this inconsistency was the desire not to have template notation in a template that is, theoretically, user-editable. (The philosophy appeared to have been that there are several easier customizable templates in Pattern Skin: WebTopBar, WebBottomBar, and WebLeftBar. The mistake about this philosophy, by the way, was to stick these into the TWiki web, making customization of these impractical. These should have been in the Main web, if at all.)

Templates are already confusing as it is. Having gratuitous inconsistencies makes the situation worse.

Description and Documentation

Redefine TWiki.WebBottomBar to use the copyright template rather than inlining its contents. It works just the same. I believe that the argument that the user visible template should not include template notation does not hold water as anybody monkeying with this template needs to understand the whole templating system anyways.

Examples

Impact

Implementation

-- Contributors: ThomasWeigert - 2010-09-24

Discussion

Agreed.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-09-28

No concerns have been raised, this is now a proposal that is AcceptedBy7DayFeedbackPeriod.

-- PeterThoeny - 2010-10-02

Ping after two years. What happened to the implementation and doc update of this feature? We will park this proposal unless there is some action. Anyone: feel tree to claim this as a committed developer to implement this.

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-10-18