[Zope3-dev] Re: Separate presentation packages

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> Jim Fulton wrote:
> 
>> I don't agree. This was huge complaint about Z2.  It was a motivation
>> for CMF skins.  People don't necessarily create multiple presentations
>> for applications, but they often want to replace the presentation of
>> products they get to make them consistent with their application
>> presentations.
> 
> Actually, while the skins machinery of the CMF makes it *possible* to 
> replace any arbitrary skin method from a third-party product, I would 
> guess that, "in the wild", replacing a bit of content-specific skin is 
> fairly rare:  such customizations are quite brittle against future 
> changes to the product, and require a deeper knowledge of the component 
> than many will want to have.  Plone 1, for instance, reused almost *all* 
> of the "content" skins from CMFDefault.

Right. For content types, that is mostly true. However, let me point out 
that the Plone community right now is at the point where they regret 
ever having built on top of CMFDefault...

Anyway, Zope3 has much more presentation-ty stuff that can be 
customized. Adding views, custom widget views, etc. come to mind. I 
could easily find myself replacing almost a whole set of browser views 
for a content type...

> The "common" replacements are for "global" skin methods (main_template 
> and related stylesheets).

Yes, but those fall under a different category... We should call those 
skin packages now. I think rotterdam and zopetop should be their own 
package below zope.app or zope.products. You simply replace one of those 
and you have a new look-and-feel. These are the kinds of packages you 
are EXPECTED to replace. In fact, it might even make a lot of sense to 
mark those as *demo* packages...

Philipp