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Are you thinking of having a library (or even market) of these designs, or is your goal more to allow each site builder to personalise their site in fine detail

by jsankey 16y ago

Are you thinking of having a library (or even market) of these designs, or is your goal more to allow each site builder to personalise their site in fine detail? If you are thinking of the latter, or both, maybe you should consider having a couple of layers of customisability. It would be nice to allow simple customisations (colors, logos, even basic layout) without getting into templates. Perhaps with a GUI, but possibly even just something standard like CSS. Even as a technically minded person, I would balk if I had to learn some custom syntax to achieve things like this. Then underneath you could have a full templating system. If users want full control, they should understand it will come with a learning curve. Even for this, consider starting from a known base (e.g. Django templates), and just building convenient constructs that fit your site (e.g. custom tags for common tasks).

johnnycage 16y ago
The primary goal initially is just to allow people to seriously alter some provided templates or to create their own, so I had not planned on having a marketplace/library (although hopefully this would come out of it). I have a lot of respect for what people have done with the Shopify templates, but I am cautious about rolling our own on the basis that it requires someone to learn it. I was looking for something that might be more widely adopted and used by a few apps (Mustache mentioned in here looks interesting and I'll check it out). In terms of customiztion with colours, logo etc - we have this already based on CSS. People can pick different colors through a color picker etc and that works well, but I want to two-tier it (as you have suggested) and allow power-users the flexibility to create their own Thanks for the reply though. Really appreciate it
- joshuacc 16y ago
  I've been building Shopify themes for the last couple of years. Part of the reason that I've stuck with it so long is that Liquid is really easy to learn. I'm of the opinion that anyone capable of understanding a for loop and if statement can learn the basics of Liquid within a day. I know there are a few other apps that use Liquid, including one of your competitors. See here for a list: http://github.com/tobi/liquid/wiki http://github.com/tobi/liquid/wiki From an end-user perspective, I'd highly recommend Liquid. I don't see how you can escape having a template language of some sort, and Liquid seems more thought-out than most.
  - johnnycage 16y ago
    I thought Liquid was created by Shopify, so apologies for that! Didn't realise it was available for others to use. It seems that its just for Ruby / RoR though? We currently use PHP and Python
    - joshuacc 16y ago
      Sorry, for some reason I just assumed you were using RoR. Liquid was created by Tobi (CEO) for Shopify, and then extracted as an open source project. It was inspired by Django's template language. Since you're on Python, perhaps you could use the original?

by jsankey 16y ago

johnnycage 16y ago

The primary goal initially is just to allow people to seriously alter some provided templates or to create their own, so I had not planned on having a marketplace/library (although hopefully this would come out of it). I have a lot of respect for what people have done with the Shopify templates, but I am cautious about rolling our own on the basis that it requires someone to learn it. I was looking for something that might be more widely adopted and used by a few apps (Mustache mentioned in here looks interesting and I'll check it out). In terms of customiztion with colours, logo etc - we have this already based on CSS. People can pick different colors through a color picker etc and that works well, but I want to two-tier it (as you have suggested) and allow power-users the flexibility to create their own Thanks for the reply though. Really appreciate it

joshuacc 16y ago
I've been building Shopify themes for the last couple of years. Part of the reason that I've stuck with it so long is that Liquid is really easy to learn. I'm of the opinion that anyone capable of understanding a for loop and if statement can learn the basics of Liquid within a day. I know there are a few other apps that use Liquid, including one of your competitors. See here for a list: http://github.com/tobi/liquid/wiki http://github.com/tobi/liquid/wiki From an end-user perspective, I'd highly recommend Liquid. I don't see how you can escape having a template language of some sort, and Liquid seems more thought-out than most.
- johnnycage 16y ago
  I thought Liquid was created by Shopify, so apologies for that! Didn't realise it was available for others to use. It seems that its just for Ruby / RoR though? We currently use PHP and Python
  - joshuacc 16y ago
    Sorry, for some reason I just assumed you were using RoR. Liquid was created by Tobi (CEO) for Shopify, and then extracted as an open source project. It was inspired by Django's template language. Since you're on Python, perhaps you could use the original?