[Templates] Benefits of Modularity/Usability

[Leo Lapworth]

Brian,

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 01:40:23PM -0600, Hann, Brian wrote:
> I do plan on separating out the header, navbar and footer,
> but the templates I'm talking about might differ by as little as
> some HTML.  For instance, you've probably used one or more of the
> popular BBS's.  The "post new topic" page will have a ton of
> images, javascript, input types, etc.  Then the "reply to topic"
> page will be EXACTLY the same as the "post new topic" page except
> some of the HTML and form stuff will be different and some
> buttons will be named differently.

Personally I'd stick this in the /templates/fullpage/ or something,
and then just to a

[% IF pageinfo.type == 'post' %]
	... post only info
[% ELSIF pageinfo.type == 'reply' %]
	... reply only info
[% END %]

But I'd make sure that you minimise these statments, e.g.
try and put all the page specific information in one of these
IF's rather than having lots of them dotted through the page.

Then your documentation should note this and suggest that
unless the user is familiar with TT they avoid editing
templates in /template/fullpage/.

Extract anything that is common across multipul pages
into seperate templates and then put the page specific logic 
in the page template. I don't think you can hand hold your
users much more than that.

Do remember to use style sheets (which I'm sure you have).

Oh, one other thing as we're rambeling, have you considered
people running multipul skinned / versions of the BBS
system on the same machine (e.g. several different sites),
I often found this lacking in other BBS systems.

Good luck.

Leo

P.S. There are no doubt better ways than this, it's just
how I would approach it.