Re: plone template customization bad practices to avoid

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2007-02-22 at 16:52 +0100, david convent wrote:
> 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. 

Do you know if these have been dealt with now? Are these files something
that we can see without access to the file system itself? Do you have
access?

> 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

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com