[drupal-devel] Page layout workflow mockup

[Chris Messina]

It does seem like the approach I've mocked up blurs the boundaries
between push and pull slightly, since you would essentially be
choosing what blocks of micro-content you want to output on your page
and in what region they would be output to.

Please note that in my mockup, I was trying to map people's geometric
understanding of a "page" as opposed Drupal's. This means of course
that the XHTML that gets output for each "region" would simply be
contained in a div:

<div class="region" id="region-a">
  ...output selected micro-content here
</div>

and so on.

I'm not sure how Karoly's suggestions, which sound similar to his
suggestion to put the page content into an array, help with this
cause. That's not to say that his ideas wouldn't help, I frankly am
not a developer enough (yet!) to comprehend his proposal.

If I were to implement this today, I would end up with a pure PHP
theme, which seems more like the "pull" model. Obviously going off in
that direction doesn't solve the problem, so we need to look at what I
can do with a custom PHP theme that I can't do with PHPTemplate or
with writing a custom module. The answer to that, for me anyway, is
not clear.

What I do know, though, is that the primary focus of this discussion
should be on how we can arbitrarily pull in micro-content blocks,
leveraging the block system that already exists. Essentially, I'm
looking to invoke the various block calls that already exist in
modules to dump content into a page. I don't know how this works in
practice, but that's how I was imagining this working when I drew up
my workflow.

Chris

On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 12:29:32 +0100, Karoly Negyesi <karoly at negyesi.net> wrote:
> > > After this you may call a page function via module_invoke and put it's
> > > output into a block.
> >
> > I don't understand your last sentence.  Mind to elaborate on that?
> > I fail to see how this would help implement Chris' proposal.
> 
> Well, maybe this is a usage of Chris' proposal and not an implementation but
> the line is not really sharp IMHO. For eg. there has been several requests
> for multiple nodes on a page -- that's what I thought of initially, but
> several anything on a page is possible.
> 
> Regads
> 
> ChX
>