[Building Sakai] Portal NEO Prefix

[Steve Swinsburg]

I think there is some confusion as to what prefix people are talking about. 

The prefix I am talking about (and I think Sam and Aaron too) is the one the portal automatically adds. I don't think this is necessary even if we had 100 different portal layouts and 1000 skins. No one is saying that the vm templates should be moved. There should always be the default ones for 2.8 and the neo ones for 2.9. Then someone can make more and put them in another directory. And then just set the property to control what set of templates to use. And what skin to suit. These properties should be final, not adjusted in code somewhere. 

So to reiterate we will always have neo-abc skins and neo templates. Just no automatic prefixing from the portal. 

I don't see that stopping anyone from adding more templates or skins and will reduce confusion about what it all does. 

Cheers
Steve



Sent from my iPhone

On 17/03/2013, at 0:04, Charles Severance <csev at umich.edu> wrote:

> Sam - One more thing, in 
> 
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/STAT-345
> 
> A tool should *never* know the prefix and properly implemented tools have no need to know the prefix. None of the core tools has or needs any awareness of the prefix.  This means Site Stats is not generating head material properly at all.  This will affect more than the skins - it will affect the rich text editor switching, etc.
> 
> So  tool *must* take its head material from the portal - not generate its own head based on cutting and pasting from a view source of another tool.   So a tool should *never* be aware of the prefix.  Bugs like this suggest to me that when we remove the old skin - we should keep the neo- prefix - so all those tools that have been cheating and putting out their own head material will get a wakeup call.  
> 
> And after we remove the prefix - perhaps when the configuration service sees a lookup for the prefix it should throw a runtime error :)
> 
> So the fix to SiteStates is to use the head material properly - and absolutely *not* use the patch in STAT-315.
> 
> On the other hand - looking at this patch:
> 
> https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-21890
> 
> The *right* approach was taken as xlogin *is* part of the portal and so if the convention changes it will (or should) know.
> 
> I also wanted to keep the prefix in place so we could keep evolving default skins if we felt like it.   We love the 2.9 skin but there will someday be some need for a 3D skin where the tabs are behind the page and you have to make a swimming motion in front of your Google classes to go from the main page to the tabs.  Having a prefix makes it so we can have a skin built nearly from scratch in a new release while leaving the old skin untouched for branches and those running older releases.   Even now, we could fix a security problem in the old skin and back-port it to 2.6 without too much pain.  It is bad strategy in portal to decide to make a whole new skin and then just start hacking the default skin of the moment and when you get close to release, you can make a last-minute decision as to which is the default.
> 
> /Chuck
> 
> On Mar 16, 2013, at 12:24 AM, Charles Severance wrote:
> 
>>> We are starting to see some requests like this one:
>>> 
>>>   https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/STAT-345
>>> 
>>> The tools include a link to the tool.css file, but it's not the one they expect because the tool has no idea about this neoprefix.
>>> 
>>> So, is neoprefix necessary?  Do we need to patch the tools to make them neo-aware?
>>> 
>>> Thanks,
>>> Sam
>>> _________
> 
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