[geeklog-devel] Re: Fortune Plugin and GL2

[Tony Bibbs]

On Fri, 21 Feb 2003, Tom Willett wrote:

> No that is not a requirement, but I have found that designing in flexibility 
> and encapsulating things in objects always ends up better in the long run, 
> even though it takes a little more design work at the beginning.  

True, just as long as we balance this flexibility with the fact that using 
layers of OO objects does have it's overhead.  I'm not saying that would 
be a big issue here.

> 
> The exchangability of template engines could have two plusses.  1)  If a 
> particular app you wanted to integrate GL2 with used a different template 
> engine, you could swap out GL2s engine.  2)  What if 2 years down the road 
> (or God forbid, just before the intial release of GL2) some new whizbang 
> template engine comes along, we could change it out with little difficulty.

Yep, on the con side, though, is template engine changes usually require 
changes to the templates (adding/removing template variables, etc).  That, 
in turn breaks any current themes so the overall value to allowing this in 
Geeklog maybe a bit overstated.  However, allowing modules to use GL's 
abstract template classes to fit their current engine does have some 
value, I admit.  That way modules can pick-n-choose which template engine 
they want to use.  Then my only question is from a end-user standpoint you 
may end up having to learn more on the rules for valid template files for 
each engine...is that oK?

> 
> One big advantage that I see to making as much as possible oo is that it 
> will be easy to create high level generic classes that plugin developers can 
> extend as needed.  With a template factory, we could even make generic 
> templates, customizable through code for such things as Admin pages.

Regardless of what we do, this will all be OO-PHP.  I think all you and I 
are talking about is if we need to introduce a layer of abstraction here.

> I have not seen this, looks interesting.  I will be on the road this weekend 
> and into next week, I will try to look at it then.

Safe journey...

-- 
Tony Bibbs          "I guess you have to remember that those who don't
tony at tonybibbs.com  hunt or fish often see those of us who do as      
                    harmlessly strange and sort of amusing. When you  
                    think about it, that might be a fair assessment." 
                    --Unknown