Proposal: Easier Weblog Design Customization

Abstract

This is a generalized proposal to provide ways to make customizations of weblog designs easier for non-technical users.

Roller already provides a powerful and flexible rendering system which basically grants users free reign over their weblog designs, but the problem now is usability. Most of the functionality requires some level of technical expertise which is not well suited for casual users and most customizations require editing the velocity template files which is intimidating and error proned for most people. The proposals below are meant to fit together to provide a new strategy to provide various weblog customization options to users which should be as simple as possible.

Proposals

Widgets and Panels
A proposal to define an architecture for managing predefined weblog widgets which can be grouped together into a panel and used for display on a weblog. Users would be able to choose widgets and arrange them all via a wysiwyg interface in the publishing UI. This would work very similarly to widgets in other blog systems.

Custom Stylesheets for Weblogs
A proposal to define a simple way for weblogs to contain a simple custom stylesheet which can be used to override the styles of a weblog theme without having to edit any templates. Users would be able to make any css styling customizations they want and it would be done through the publishing UI.

Theme XML Descriptor
To support some of the proposals above we would need to provide more functionality to our themes and that would be done by introducing an xml theme descriptor file. The file would be used to not only define the templates and resources used by a theme but also some of the other more complex features.

Issues

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