Has the "Template dropdown" plug-in been finished?

[Carl @ ATS]

Sorry for asking what may seem like a silly question to experienced users here, but I've only just started using this particular plug-in.

Why is it that some of the names mentioned in the drop-down menu like "Bulletproof" and "Coffee Cup" act like skins on my blog, changing the design and colour of it, while others just cause the blog to disappear? The idea of being able to apply a different skin to a blog and leave all its content intact is a neat one, but I'm puzzled by the fact that some of the entries only leave a few words left at the top - there's no page structure any more, no boxes for the individual plug-ins I've installed, just a sort of "building site", as you can see from the screen shots I've made.

If some of these entries in the list really are "work in progress", I think it would be better for the developers who are responsible for them to hide them from view, wouldn't it? That way they wouldn't be able to be selected by less experienced bloggers and, particularly, their readers. Or have I missed something important? (I expect so.)

Regards,

Carl

[Timbalu]

That is, while some templates, like idea, blue, some mt_* and some other special ones are somehow buggy, I assume. They should error somewhere..., I'd say inside the servers error.log file.

It might very well be there are some unknown Smarty3 incompatibilities in them. If you find them, we'll fix them!

Beside this, I don't think the templatechooser plugin is of any good to a visitor.

PS. And (as a personal note) announcing this BSI alert blah blah to the public as well. At least without any critical notes to first use brain

Edit: For the moment I don't have time to investigate this, but at least for "idea" and "blue" I would not assume them to be buggy. The funny thing is, they are part of core delivered templates, but do also appear nearly empty in spartacus additional_templates.

[Carl @ ATS]

Good morning Ian,

Thank you for replying last night, but your message was rather confusing. First of all, one of the developers last year (was it you?) told me users should report anything that doesn't work properly via this forum so it can be fixed, which is why I got in touch. I can't say whether or not this particular plug-in is buggy as I'm not a programmer myself, but it doesn't work the way I would expect it to. I mentioned the points I've noticed yesterday and gave you some examples of skins that work and skins that don't, so I won't go into that again. You seem to have discovered this yourself now, too.

It would be great if you and your fellow php programmers would adapt the plug-in when you have time. I personally think it should only include items that will create proper skins; everything else should be removed so it can't be seen or selected.

Regarding your comment "I don't think the templatechooser plugin is of any good to a visitor", I disagree with you; I think it makes a nice change for the reader to be able to change the skin if he/she wants to give a blog a "nicer" appearance in his/her view. If this is not meant to be one of the purposes of the plug-in, then I don't understand why it is visible to readers at all once it has been installed. What the reader sees (or is permitted to see) ought to be of use to him, otherwise it is just useless clutter on a screen.

Finally, regarding your personal note, you seem to feel I've done something wrong. But what? I don't follow you, I'm afraid. As I've said, this plug-in doesn't seem to be working properly, so now s9y's programmers know about it (through this members-only forum, which is not freely accessible to anyone), they can hopefully get to work fixing it.

Regards,

Carl

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Thanks for mentioning this! I will take a look at it, like Ian mentioned it might simply be because we keep around some very old templates in our core, and as you have found out, some of them do not seem to properly work. You are right that this shouldn't happen, we'll get on this.

Regards,
Garvin

[Timbalu]

Yeah, sorry to be confusing.
Sure we want the plugin to be at least workable, even if it is a plugin I nowadays would not recommend to use any more (*). I got in touch with Garvin because of this. (Hey - I saw he just dropped in.)
If you can help and get an abstract of the error.log, this would help to see the real cause of break.

As an addition to my personal note about your BSI blog entry, please read something like:
http://blog.polygon.de/2014/01/25/pis_b ... beute/5348

(*) In special since there are some templates in the list, which are not usable as easy as a normal template.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

OK, I got it fixed. The templatechooser plugin was now falling back to "bulletproof" as default template engine, however that causes problems when you are in fact not using bulletproof and not having configured its theme options.

I've now patched the plugin to always fall back on the "default" template, which is what the style.css of those templates also require. So all should be well then.

This is fixed in this commit: https://github.com/s9y/Serendipity/comm ... dfc3f3faa2

Regards,
Garvin

[Carl @ ATS]

Hi Garvin,

Thanks for dealing with the issue so quickly.

Ian, thanks for the link to the critical blog post on the BSI's security test. Now I understand what you meant.

Regarding the plug-in again, if you feel it shouldn't be used any more, then I suggest you and the other programmers discuss the matter together and either rewrite it in a way the majority of you agree on or remove it from the list of installable plug-ins. All I would like to have personally is a set of plug-ins that work properly so I can just focus on my blog and not spend as much time sorting out technical issues.

Thanks again for your help.

Regards,

Carl

[Carl @ ATS]

Hi Garvin,

I've just tried updating from v1.7.5 to 1.7.6, but that leads to an error message: "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ';', expecting ',' or ')' in /www/htdocs/.../blog/plugins/serendipity_event_templatechooser/serendipity_event_templatechooser.php on line 60"

I've just re-installed templatechooser v1.7.5 and now the v1.7.6 blog seems to be working fine, but something's obviously wrong with the syntax in templatechooser v1.7.6.

Regards,

Carl

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

My bad. I am prepping 1.7.7 to fix this

Regards,
Garvin

[Timbalu]

Carl, I just noticed you are using the piwik script per entry.
Beside it is parsed by nl2br, it should really be used per page only (snip to right before closing body in index.tpl) to get the page once per request.

[Carl @ ATS]

[quote="Timbalu"]... (snip to right before closing body in index.tpl) to get the page once per request./quote]

Hi Ian,

Thanks for mentioning that. Do you mean I should paste the piwik blurb into index.tpl near the end of the body, just before the closing tag </body>? And will that give me statistics that show me which blog posts (= entries) are being viewed (and indirectly, which are not)?

Regards,

Carl

[Timbalu]

Yes, since a single entry request is an extra page, which also uses the the index.tpl. Else you will have the current entries page, with ie. 5 to 15 entries per page each telling piwik to request this page again and again. I even wonder why this does not(?) slow down you site dramatically...