More Designer Friendly
2006.07.29 18:26
Now that Templation's been out in the wild for a while I'm starting to see where the problems crop up for beginners. There's no reason installing and getting started with Templation should be complicated. In fact, Templation ought to be a very designer-friendly tool, because its primarily oriented towards structuring HTML efficiently.
Of course as a programmer I get more excited about the deep customization using widgets, but admittedly the power of widgets is a moot point to someone who doesn't yet understand the basics.
In order to make Templation a better out-of-the-box experience I've identified the following steps towards improvement:
- Fix the documentation and example site so it is entirely self-contained and can be installed in sub-directories as well as at the site root.
- De-emphasize the central
datarepository. Focus on site-specific_datarepositories instead. This keeps the templates closer to the source files and isolates the user from the Templation installation directory by default. - Remove the PEAR dependency. Originally I toyed with the idea of submitting Templation to PEAR, but I decided that PEAR was too intimidating for non-programmers whom I hoped could also use Templation. The only thing it uses PEAR for is error handling, and it doesn't do that great a job with it anyway.
- Rewrite the error system. The system needs to be both more verbose and more flexible. Helpful error messages are perhaps the single most lacking point of Templation.
- Improve the tools. The Visualizer could be much more efficient with AJAX. The Site Exporter needs to be completed and usable so. Additionally things like a TextMate syntax and localhosting installation instructions and tips for working with Dreamweaver will make for a more user-friendly experience for non-programmers.
Since I'm transferring the repository to Google Code Hosting, now is the ideal time to make major structural changes such as removing PEAR and moving documentation and example files around. Look for beta 4 to be quite a bit easier to install and use.
