Should there be a 'blank template'?

[Rebecca]

Hi guys, I was just thinking... Could we benefit from a blank template?

It's interesting to have an almost live example of a site just after we install PW2, but maybe by having a blank standard template it would be easier to have programmers program and designers do their magic.  Remember the CSS Zen Garden? A blank template would also mean that both programmers and designers can work at the same time, or that it would be easier to port a template from another CMS (an existing site perhaps?).

That's not to say that this should be how it's done, but it might be an option.

What do you think?

[Adam Kiss]

Hi Rebecca,

what do you mean under 'blank template'? Basically, every php file you create inside /templates/ folder is a blank template, so I'm not sure I understand you there.

[Rebecca]

See this : http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html

With the use of CSS you can make it look like anything you want. (see a LOT of examples at http://www.csszengarden.com/)

My suggestion is if it would be wise to develop a blank template (such as that one) that either came standard with process wire or could be auto generated by PW2 when there's no template file uploaded for your new custom page?

See, the beauty of it would be that you get a blank template that only needs you to plug in the CSS to make it look as you need it to be.

An online template editor/creator integrated would be much better IMHO, more so if PW2 would allow you to set up specific options while editing a field type, to assist you better in creating your simple templates files that only need the proper CSS file to change how they look.

[Adam Kiss]

Ah, I understand now [somewhat]. You are talking about autogeneration of some basic HTML markup when new template is created/saved and no template file is present, right?

The nice thing of it would be, that actually, without developing any templates, you could have real, HTMLified output!

However, I see currently few problems with it:

• in PW, nobody tells you what functions have fields. While this might be nightmare for beginners, most of web developers love it [because you just plug in one textfield and that might be email, or price, or name, or link, or string acting as binary number (yeah, I did that...)]
  
• ...and that's also problem of this – field is a way to say how to edit content, not what structural [in a 'structure of document' way] element it is, i.e. how would you ouptut textarea? Its content might be one paragraph or it may be more, or anything else, actually. Markup generation works for CMSs, that have few given [and unchangable fields] with their meaning. If you have 'blog' in some CMS, it has title, body and author. The system knows what each of this does. But PW doesn't (and that gives it the power it has).
  
• Only way to do this, is to define some field–structure relationships, or some systematical descriptions. And would use that? Beginners, or end-users, if you will, will be intimitated much sooner before they get to this auto-generation feature. And most advanced users have their ways through the fields so mysterious sometimes, that they would delete everything auto-generated as a first thing everytime they work on a new website.
  

[ryan]

I wanted to mention that there is something sort of like this. I use it mostly for quick prototyping pages and stuff, but take a look at the Admin > Modules > MarkupPageFields, and click install if it's not already.

Then in your template(s), you would do something like this, probably in your main content column:

<?php echo $page->renderFields(); ?>

That will render all of your fields and values on the page in an HTML definition list. It's a quick way to get a look at all your data in context before you produce your real templates.

But I see this as a tool to help with development and prototyping, and not something to use for production sites (though you certainly could if you wanted to).