Active Development

[Carlos Phelps]

How many people are actively developing greymatter?

What area of development are they focusing on?

[coldstone]

That is a good question. Right now, as far as I know, its myself and Pete Finnigan.

I am focusing on refactoring the code to be more modular and easier to add enhancements. I have documented this in the gm_dev_guide.html that comes with GreyMatter. I also look for defects mentioned on the forums and attempt to fix them, depending on time and how extensive the fix will be.

[Carlos Phelps]

I have setup two copies of Greymatter 1.7.1 on one of my web servers. The first one is my base line and the only changes I made to it is edit the templates so that they produce valid xhtml.

The second copy I am going thru the gm-library from line 1 on. My goal is have all web pages produced by Greymatter to be valid xhtml/css. I am using it to keep a log of all changes made.

[coldstone]

Thats cool. Gm should be able to do valid xhtml/css. The Admin screens are very table heavy and I think it would be cool to move to styled divs. I am not anti-table, but they are using a trick I used to use, in which you create a nesting table with a 1% pad to create a border, so two tables instead of one div with border attribute.

[petefinnigan]

Hi,

Yes i would agree, I have not heard of anyone else (so far) apart from myself and Coldstone. I am working in feeds, comment moedreation queue and will also work on draft posts after that.

thanks for your help

cheers

Pete

[Carlos Phelps]

Thanks for the cheers.

If you like to see how far along I am, the active log is at phd-hosting.com/greymatter/beta/

[coldstone]

Looks interesting. I noticed you separated some of the stuff out. I only half finished moving the Admin css and js to the lib/Gm_Web.pm.

My only concern is: moving the css into seperate files is usually a good thing, but I was a fan of Gm keeping it all together. I thought it was nice to keep it togther since there is less files and its easier for a new person to edit, they don't have to do server side file access to change the css, they can just use Gm's template editor. A more advanced user can then use the templates to link to external css/js files and avoid name collisions on the users file system.

[Carlos Phelps]

I was thinking that this is the first step toward themes or skins.

• Remove css and link
  
• Remove js and link
  
• Remove all deprecated tags
  
• Bring remaining HTML up to XHTML
  
• Reduce tables use for layout
  
• Add interface to save or select themes
  

What do to think?

[coldstone]

Its interesting, but do you mean themes for the admin side, or themes for the web log side?

Its actually not too bad to switch themes, you just upload a new gm-templates file, but I think it should be handled by the ui so you cold have more than one. I have put some thought into this as well and the issue I always stumbled on was that if you seperate out the css/js from the template file, then thats another folder to maintain and update when installing new themes. Now if the theme uses emoticons or images, then this is unavoidable.

But basically I was thinking you would have a gm/cgi-bin/themes/new_theme.cgi, which would be a template file with the name of the theme. But for emoticons and images (and external js/css files) you would also need a directory under the web readable dir, such as gm/themes/new_theme.

However, since the {{logwebpath}} is defined, template authors could use that to specify the location of external files. Basically multi-theme stuff would need a admin screen to switch/install themes, and a new template variable for the theme name.

I think alot of people customize the template file, so we can clean it up, but I think most people do that during the course of customizing it.

Just some thoughts ...

[Carlos Phelps]

Coldstone,

The themes would be for the web log side.

I was thinking we would have something like gm/cgi-bin/themes/new_theme/gm-template.cgi

Have the ui check to see if there are any folders in the theme folder

• if none are there then use the default gm-template.cgi
  
• if one or more was there then offer a choice
  

When starting a new theme the ui would have you name it then the ui would create a folder with this name in the the theme folder. A copy of the gm-template.cgi would be copied to that folder which you could change without effecting the default theme.

Any external files related to a theme would be kept in the related theme folder.

[coldstone]

I was thinking of something similar, except that the other files can't be in the cgi-bin folder (not on all hosts I should say), for instance on my web host, I can't access html files in my cgi-bin directory. Thats one of the issues with putting all the files in one place.