Idea?
pumpkin
Registered Users Posts: 25 Big grins
I was feeling a little disappointed in the customizability of my page (although I still love the service! :P) until I realized that I could change anything using javascript. However it still feels a little hackish, for example, to remove the feeds section at the bottom of the page (which annoys me) using a
document.getElementById('feeds').innerHTML="";
in a script that gets run in the body onload event. The feeds link appears at the bottom of the page until the onload event has had a chance to run and then it gets removed. I realize that for a simple change like this, it would be sufficient to change the CSS and just give the feeds section a "visibility: hidden" style, but if I wanted to actually make some changes to the basic table structure, it would make it a lot harder.
So I was wondering (and I know this would require a major rework of the current system) if it would be possible to have a template-based system? Something where we'd have the basic page template with dynamic sections that got preprocessed out, a bit like php. For example, we could have a template for the main page that included a "dynamic" galleries tag inside it, that your server software replaced with the contents of a galleries template. The galleries template would also be dynamic in that it would loop through a gallerylink tag that would import another template. This way, we'd be able to decide on the style for everything on the page, if we chose to.
For example, on the current smugmug scheme, each link to a gallery goes inside its own table. So a gallerylink template, as I described above, would contain just this individual table code. It would have the layout for the table, and would have a couple of dynamic tags inside it that would allow us to retrieve information on the "current" gallery, such as the featured picture URL, the link URL, and description/last modified etc.
This gallerylink template would then be referenced by the gallerylist template, which would handle the structure of the list of galleries. It would take care of looping through the list of included gallerylink instances.
Finally, the mainpage template would just contain a dynamic tag that would load in the gallerylist template.
This could be expanded to cover the entire set of user-customizable pages, and would allow us (if we were so inclined) to do anything to our pages.
The main reason I thought of this was because I'd like to have my gallery titles below the image, and not next to it. As it is (unless I'm missing something,) I have to write a javascript hack that rearranges the innerhtml of the containing table object.
Anyway, just an idea! Wonderful service anyway
I'd be happy to explain what I'm thinking of in more detail if anyone's interested...
Daniel
document.getElementById('feeds').innerHTML="";
in a script that gets run in the body onload event. The feeds link appears at the bottom of the page until the onload event has had a chance to run and then it gets removed. I realize that for a simple change like this, it would be sufficient to change the CSS and just give the feeds section a "visibility: hidden" style, but if I wanted to actually make some changes to the basic table structure, it would make it a lot harder.
So I was wondering (and I know this would require a major rework of the current system) if it would be possible to have a template-based system? Something where we'd have the basic page template with dynamic sections that got preprocessed out, a bit like php. For example, we could have a template for the main page that included a "dynamic" galleries tag inside it, that your server software replaced with the contents of a galleries template. The galleries template would also be dynamic in that it would loop through a gallerylink tag that would import another template. This way, we'd be able to decide on the style for everything on the page, if we chose to.
For example, on the current smugmug scheme, each link to a gallery goes inside its own table. So a gallerylink template, as I described above, would contain just this individual table code. It would have the layout for the table, and would have a couple of dynamic tags inside it that would allow us to retrieve information on the "current" gallery, such as the featured picture URL, the link URL, and description/last modified etc.
This gallerylink template would then be referenced by the gallerylist template, which would handle the structure of the list of galleries. It would take care of looping through the list of included gallerylink instances.
Finally, the mainpage template would just contain a dynamic tag that would load in the gallerylist template.
This could be expanded to cover the entire set of user-customizable pages, and would allow us (if we were so inclined) to do anything to our pages.
The main reason I thought of this was because I'd like to have my gallery titles below the image, and not next to it. As it is (unless I'm missing something,) I have to write a javascript hack that rearranges the innerhtml of the containing table object.
Anyway, just an idea! Wonderful service anyway
I'd be happy to explain what I'm thinking of in more detail if anyone's interested...
Daniel
0
Comments