this whole mars thing is becoming really really complicated. and in a way, i feel sort of shameful that all the work is being done on the backend, so that you can’t even tell there’s any difference at all. of course, that’s also a really good thing.
right now i’m working on a method of telling the thing what to do in case of any special requirements a template might have, such as the extra content it serves up in the case of a template that uses CSS alpha filters, viewed via Internet Explorer, which causes text to appear dim, owing to shitty inheritance control on behalf of Microsoft… which requires that a separate layer of opaque content be layered exactly on top of the original content.
that’s just one example. in the past, i had it set up so that the browser was detected, then the routine checked a set of predefined variables and determined whether or not to perform a certain action. this relied on the template names to be hard-coded into the script… which works fine, except that adding new themes requires the admin to edit files, which is not what i want. i wanted it to be easier than that.
so right now, all themes are detected via reading from a directory to see what folders there are, and whatever those folders are named, no matter how many there are, are what gets inserted into much of the system’s scripts.
it’s going rather splendidly, actually, except that it’s slow going. but so far things seem to work just fine.
there are two other issues, however, that i need to address.
one- cookies store the name of the template. when the template name changes, which is the case with “mars” becoming “mars_surface”, and “lair” becoming “the_mantis-_lair” (a move i made to make it easier to prettify the names for output into, say, the skin selector jumpbox), the system doesn’t know what to do, and loads of errors result… because there IS no longer a file or folder with the old names.
at first, i tried to code a routine that would set and check the value of a cookie’s version #. this was a little unneccessarily awkward. so i have now decided that i will simply rename (delete and reset, actually) the damn cookie, and change all the scripts that call for the cookie to be read. and that’s that. i don’t foresee any problems with doing things that way whatsoever.
two- because this bugger is becoming so fucking complicated, there are now config folders, image folders with thematic subfolders, includes folders, et cetera… and i am now considering how much work it would take to just lump all of the template shit into one big damn folder with all the subfolders it could ever need or want.
meat-thing.com/marsdev (not real up-to-date, but again, the differences aren’t noticeable anyway)
