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Roadmap for Customisation

As I mentioned in my article about managing expectations yesterday, my primary goal for Pixaria Gallery 3.0 is better customisability. For different people, this term has different meanings so I think it's helpful to explain what customisability means when discussing web application package such as Pixaria Gallery.

From a programmer's perspective, the simplest way of providing customisability for a PHP script like Pixaria is to provide support for themes by using a template engine. In the case of Pixaria, I made a decision a few years back to use the third party Smarty library which has the advantage of separating PHP from HTML and makes doing customisations a little simpler for people who don't know how to write PHP code. In this way, the various template files used to create the user interface of the Pixaria software can be packaged up into distinct themes which the user can modify to customise the appearance of the software.

A more complex approach (for the software developer) is to provide support for non-programmatic customisation by making as many appearance and user interface options as possible into settings that can be modified in the administration controls.

From an end user perspective, the benefits of this second approach are massive as most common types of modifications such as changing fonts and colours can then be done without having to know any CSS or HTML. The difficulty with this approach however is that making a user interface customisable in the admin area has the potential to make customisation more complicated for people who prefer to work directly on the software code.

The problem then is how to balance the needs of non technical users who don't know how to (or simply don't want to) modify code and those who demand absolute flexibility to modify every aspect of their site's appearance and behaviour. Solving this question is one of my main goals for Pixaria Gallery 3.0 and which is where I hope to finally achieve a number of things that until now have not worked out quite as planned.

The four key goals for Pixaria Gallery 3.0 will be:

1. Provide more than one theme for users.
2. Provide the capability to edit selected fonts, colours and images in the admin controls.
3. Make the front-end style sheet (CSS) as simple as it can possibly be without sacrificing functionality.
4. Maintain backwards compatibility.

To tackle these design goals, the front end user interface in Pixaria Gallery 3.0 will be based on two superficially identical themes one of which will support customisation in the admin area and the other of which will not. By separating the theme which can be customised in the admin controls from the one that cannot, it should be possible to satisfy the requirements of both technically capable users and those with limited experience with CSS, HTML and the rest.

At the same as this work is done, I will also be taking the opportunity to rewrite much of the HTML and all of the CSS for the front end to make it simpler. As is often the way, Pixaria has accumulated its fair share of old and hard to maintain code over the years and it's well overdue a clean up to get rid of this.

I hope that the work I will be doing to make theming, customisation and appearance modifications simpler means that people will be keen to make use of the planned capabilities but I recognise there can be a significant amount of work involved in this and so I will be aiming for the ambitious goal of full backwards compatibility with existing themes where possible.

As always, I welcome feedback on these ideas but at the present time, it's important to note that my main priorities are the store improvements planned for versions 2.8 and 2.9.

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