Serendipity Forums

A plugin exists for a "template dropdown". However, now we have this new concept of template options, one of which could be a colorset selection.

It occurs to me that a site owner might want to offer a front-end user the option to select from the available colorsets (if any) on their own, without affecting the site default... much like the template dropdown works, but without offering the front-end users the choice of ALL templates that might exist on the site owner's server.

I do not know if this is best handled by a sidebar plugin, or a select field elsewhere on the page, such as the footer.

However, it is not quite that simple. This might also need to tie back into the current template dropdown. Afterall, given the choice of a template to choose from is great, but if that template has colorset options, it would be great to be able to make this additional selection as well.

Another caveat - I do not know if the template dropdown plugin should be a requirement just because a template author wants to give a site owner the option of presenting their users with a colorset option (make sense?).

Perhaps this is more simple than I imagine.... so, where do I begin?

Hi!

Since this would be an enhancement of the template dropdown PHP plugin, one would need to extend that to also read a template'S config.inc.php file and make specific options available.

This would be nice to have, I agree. But it's also some PHP work to do.

As you propose, you could code it into the template itself, and add config.inc.php code to it checking on $serendipity['GET'] variables etc. But that would put a lot of code logic into a template, which I don't really like. Template options are already getting more and more logic in config.inc.phps which is adding to overhead more and more...

Another caveat - I do not know if the template dropdown plugin should be a requirement just because a template author wants to give a site owner the option of presenting their users with a colorset option (make sense?).

IMHO this is purely the choice of a plugin owner, if template options should be presented to the user. It makes sense that blogs have a unique color scheme that cannot be switched.

Best regards,
Garivn