[Owncloud] Theming and Formfactors

[Frank Karlitschek]

On 01.02.2012, at 15:46, Robin Appelman wrote:

> On Wednesday 01 February 2012 15:18:31 Frank Karlitschek wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> 
>> it seams that a lot of users want to modify the look and feel of ownCloud
>> like replacing the logo, changing colors or make other custom interface
>> changes. This is important if you integrate onwCloud into an existing
>> system like a groupware or some other webservice. At the moment the users
>> have to fork ownCloud and change the stuff manually. This changes have to
>> be done again after every ownCloud update.
>> 
>> 
>> The idea is to support theming in ownCloud to make this kind of changes
>> easiert. It´s very important to make the life of the ownCloud App developer
>> as easy as possible and not force them to maintain a lot of different theme
>> files. App developers should concentrate of implementing the functionality
>> and all the theming should be optional and done by someone else.
>> 
>> Different formfactors:
>> Another important topic is that we have to support different formfactors
>> beside the current interface which is mainly done for desktop users.
>> ownCloud should provide an interface for desktops, mobil phones, tablets
>> and a standalone view where an ownCloud App is displayed without the header
>> and the side navigation. This is cool if you want to us just one part of
>> ownCloud as a desktop app replacement. Mozilla Prism is a nice tool for
>> this and I think the GNOME browser and Chrome also supports that. It´s
>> handy for apps like media player, calendar, contacts and others to have
>> them as stand alone apps on your desktop.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I propose the following changes to make this two features possible:
>> 
>> Formfactors:
>> All parts of the core and every app has a template, a js and a css folder.
>> We could extend the templating and the js/css loader that it first looks
>> for a foo-mobile.php template if the app wants to load the foo.php template
>> and the current formfactor is "mobile". If it finds the file it loads it.
>> If not if falls back to the default foo.php. The same logic for the js and
>> css files. By doing this we don´t have to implement the complete interface
>> right now for all formfactors. We can do this over time. And if one App
>> developer want´s to provide a special tablet optimized css he just add an
>> additional css with this special name and it´s automatically used.
> 
> I had exactly the same idea for formfactors :)
> I would suggest one tiny change though, use foo.mobile.php instead of 
> foo-mobile.php

Hehe. cool. The approach can´t be completely wrong if you had the same idea.
I like your idea with the naming convention.


> 
>> 
>> The formfator is already detected in base.php so we only have to extend the
>> templating to use this information. Later we could add a button to the
>> interface to switch to a different interface.
>> 
>> 
>> Theming:
>> I propose a similar system for the theming. We add a "theme" config option
>> to the config.php so that the theme can be configured during deployment and
>> controlled from the outside without the need to understand our database
>> structure. We add "themes" directory into /core where every theme has a
>> directory named after the theme name. The template and css loader looks
>> into the selected theme directory first for templates and css files and
>> loads them if a file is present. If not it just falls back to the default
>> files in the individual app directories. This has the benefit that the
>> person who creates the themes can override what ever has to be changed but
>> don´t have to provide a complete new frontend. The directory structure
>> inside the themes folder is the same as the rest of owncloud. This means
>> that a theme developer can just put a different
>> "apps/contacts/css/styles.css" in the theme directory to change the style
>> of the contacts app.
> 
> Sounds good, although I would not put the styles in the core folder, maybe add 
> a top-level themes folder?

Sure. good idea! :-)


>> 
>> 
>> Does this make sense?
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Cheers
>> Frank
> 
> - Robin Appelman
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