[Koha-devel] Theme Structure 3.0

[MJ Ray]

Our current template structure is something like:
  SITE/htdocs/SITE-tmpl/THEME/LANG/OBJECT
where
  SITE   = { intranet, opac }
  THEME  = { default, npl, vanilla, ... }
  LANG   = { <empty>, en, es, fr, pl, zh-TW, ... }
  OBJECT = { <empty>, includes, LANG=en?images }

It's probably not ideal to have all of these in htdocs, as some
aren't really for direct download.  Languages and images are
also subordinate to themes, which has some side-effects.

I suggest splitting includes, languages and templates so
we get something like:
  templates/TYPE/THING/SCOPE
where
  TYPE  = { htdocs, l10n, tmpl }
  THING = { images, includes, LANG, default, npl, vanilla, ... }
  SCOPE = { default, intranet, opac, ... (may grow if needed) }
and language, style and theme are set independently in koha.
koha then looks at templates/l10n/LANG:templates/tmpl/THEME
:templates/tmpl/THEME/LANG for its files, which may include
things from templates/htdocs served by the httpd.

This will let koha themes, styles and translations be maintained
and used independently.  As this requires some rewriting
of the httpd config, it should be possible to support the
single-vhost installation which seems a FAQ (when you only have
one hostname-port combination to run on).

The downside is that we will need to provide guidelines for the
themes, styles and translations and it may need some careful work
to get the same performance as the current template compiler.
So that we don't lose anything if it doesn't work, I will branch
3.0 when the time comes and develop/test it there.

Comments?

Thanks,
-- 
MJ Ray - see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
North End, Lynn, Norfolk, England
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/
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