plone template customization bad practices to avoid

["david convent" <davconvent gmail com>]

Hi to all people who work on the gnometheme product that adds the Gnome Theme to a Plone portal.

While working on the refactoring of the second navbar, I noticed some practices that must be avoided when customizing original Plone templates.

I take as examples the global_sections.pt and global_siteactions.pt templates:

in global_sections:

- in the customized template, a lot of space characters and end of lines have been removed.
    This is bad because for two reasons:
    First: it makes it difficult for contributors to identify the changes that have been applied to the customized file when comparing them in a text editor
    Second: it makes quite impossible to have something readable/usable if we perform a diff -u between the original file and its customization.
    The diff command is very important when we need to adapt the customized template to a Plone version that has a modified version of the original one.
    I strongly recommend to keep the customized file layout as close as possible to the original one if we want a product that is future proof and contributor friendly.

- The title of the section (<h5>Sections</h5>) has been removed in the customization.
    I goes against accessibility, for blind people and for people that use a text-only browser.
    I recommend to keep those titles, and make them invisible for modern browsers by using the CSS 'display: none;' directive.
    Plone is very well rated in the CMS world because it's been written while keeping accessibility rules in mind, it would be a shame to destroy that just because we are lazy enough not to write a few CSS lines.


in global_siteactions.pt:

The only change that I see between the original file and its customization is the modification of the (CSS) id of the macro: it's been changed from portal-sitactions to foobar.
the original markup in Plone was studied to be designer friendly, with semantic ids and classes.
I wonder what motivated such change to a non semantic markup. isn't it possible to keep the original markup and use it in the stylesheets?
I know it's a word play about footer bar (foo…bar) but this doesn't look useful at all and not future proof at all (do we really want to take care of that template when it will change in a future Plone version, only because a CSS id was changed for fun?).


Hope to have been of constructive criticism,
David