Hi!

We are thinking of making a major change in the template system and I'd like some feedback.

Currently, the templates are structured like:


What we want to add is a 'local' directory to that so it would look like:


The purpose of this directory is for you to store any customized templates. So for example, if you change the header and footer template, your changes would be saved in /default/local/header.html and /default/local/footer.html. Then the template parser would be smart enough that it would use default/local/header.html instead of default/header.html.

The template editor would also be smart enough to save your changes into local.

The goal here is that the templates in default are the ones that came when you installed the program, and the ones in default/local are your customizations.

When you upgrade, all default ones will just be replaced with the new templates, however your local ones are preserved. That way if you have just changed the header/footer, there is no work in upgrading. If you have made customizations you can compare the default one with the local one to see what has changed.

I hope I explained this well, but I have a feeling I didn't. =) Does this make sense? Is this useful? Can you see problems with this (one problem is people should not edit the default ones anymore as it will get lost in upgrades).

Let me know what you think,

Cheers,

Alex
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Gossamer Threads Inc.