Dizkus

Guys-

I have done some reading and I heard the XTE is going to come standard with ver .8 of PostNuke.

I am just about ready to theme my site and would like to know what theme system I should go with?

Does anyone know when the new version is coming out and if I theme with XTE now how dificult will it be to transfer my theme to the new system?

Thanks,
Jon

I can only speak to your first question, and I say, try them both and see which you prefer.

-Shawn

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Get the Revolutionary AutoTheme HTML Theme System! Currently for PostNuke, PHP-Nuke, MD-Pro, CRE Loaded, osCommerce and Wordpress!

There is another important consideration. There is zero community support for Xanthia (most users seem to hate it), whereas there are hundreds and hundreds of themes for the AutoTheme module.

Plus, the AutoThemes module is cross-platform. If you decide 6 months from now that you want to move to another CMS, you'll be able to use your theme on any of the major CMS engines.

Autothemes, you're welcome to your opinion of XTE, but I'll ask that you refrain from the pointless criticizm. You are the only one I see outright blasting Xanthia, and I've yet to see you give any constructive comments on it, just pointless, inflamatory comments like "It sucks" or "No one likes it".

Right now I have both AT lite and XTE on my site and I like them both but I would have to say that I have got more out of trying to make my own theme from XTE then AT/L, even tho XTE still has some bugs to be sorted out but I can see why the PN Devs have gone down this road and having XTE ship with the next PN.

All the themes that I use right now are AT but with time I can see that theres going to be a lot of XTE themes comming out and with both PN .750 and PN 8 using XTE I got it now so I know how to use it befor the next PN comes out with it.

So I would say get both as thay can both run on you site with no probs (well I have had non yet) and then you can have the best of both worlds :)

Yes yes, I'll refrain from saying naughty things about Xanthia. The fact remains, however, that there is enormous community support for the AutoThemes module while there is virtually no support for Xanthia. I hardly ever see anyone even ask a question about it. I've seen nary a theme made with Xanthia.

It strikes me that Xanthia is likely to be like the Beta Max. Even if its better (which it ain't), I can't see it catching on.

You ignore the fact that AutoTheme has been around and stable longer than Xanthia. In fact, Xanthia is currently only available in RC status as some final bugs are squished. The core themes have been ported to Xanthia, as well as 2 new themes that ship in the Xanthia Theme Pack. Mark West recently released an Xanthia theme port, and I have 4 templates I'm going to turn in to Xanthia themes when time permits. It's quicker, right now for me to port a template to AutoTheme because I have some tools of sorts I use to speed the process along for me, but from the layout side, Xanthia is not really much more difficult than AutoTheme. Xanthia also provides a Caching mechanism that will help with popular sites by reducing the ammount of processing time used to display a page.

And again, you claim it's not better and offer no explanation.

You just made my point. There are no available themes for Xanthia. You'll port them when you get around to it. I may port the 150 that I have on my site too at some point, but I don't see any compelling reason to do it. I fail to understand why the design team is wasting effort on Xanthia. I know it their prerogative, but I still am baffled by the decision.

Because of it's foundation in Smarty. AutoTheme could have been a good solution, but by Shawn's own admission, while it can do what pnRender does, the capability is undocumented. There's also the fact that Smarty, and by extension, Xanthia are Open Sourced, GPL, while AT Pro is not GPL, there is more room to work from Xanthia/Smarty than there is with AutoTheme. Due to it's roots in Smarty, Xanthia has a Caching ability built in to it as well, which will help in page load times and the processor load on the server.

As Michael has outlined the consideration is the overall XTE pacakge not just xanthia vs AutoTheme. The consistency between the templates used in pnrender and xanthia provides for a more coherant package. The comparision in number of themes available is reversed when looking at the number of modules available that use pnRender vs the undocumented AutoTheme module templating capabilities.

I also believe the extensibilty provided by Smarty core outweighs the exstensibility offered by AutoTheme. I don't pretend to be an expert on AutoTheme but as an example Xanthia themes can offer extended theme capabilities via custom theme based plugins. The equivalent would be theme based AutoTheme commands - are these possible?

I don't believe AutoTheme has the existence of modifers, output, pre and post filters, block functions etc. that smarty offers. Many of these features have not been touched on yet in any themes or modules. The extensible architecure of Smarty provides for a very flexible, scalable and powerful.

To illustrate a few of the nice features of xanthia/pnrender.

1) Template logic - you can add simple logic structures to your templates
e.g.


2) The count_words modifier. Display the number of words more rather than bytes for in the news module
.

3) non HTML themes. Using theme based template overrides for pnRender combined with a xanthia theme you can create templated non HTML content - e.g. http://www.markwest.…c=view&theme=RSS091

That's just two examples of the flexibility of
Smarty is a solid, scalable, powerful and flexible open source project that provides an excellent base from which to build. In common with the use of ADODB PN will look to utilise existing open source projects whereever possible.

-Mark

Damn. You guys are good. I really appreciate the posts. Mark, you are way over my head so I really can't respond. I'll say that you've certainly intrigued me by the possibilities of Xanthia (and believe me, as our capable Corp team member Michael knows, I don't give in easily :)

I do know that AT has extensive "extra" commands that Shawn will be expanding for the next release. As you aptly point out, however, those features are not available in the free edition.

When is the next Xanthia release? Will it be before 8.0?

Xanthia will be a part of the forthcoming 750 release.

I'm pleased your intrigued.... ;) There are a lot of capabilities of Smarty that really haven't been explored yet.

We've touched on output filters a little with the short URL support in Xanthia. Output filters are a plugin type operate on the compiled templates (*). These essential provide a generic architecture for search and replaces on the output. We ship two with Xanthia short urls and trim whitespace - the latter removes any whitespace reducing overall size of the HTML shipped to the browser at the expense of a little overhead server side. All output filters are optional.

Resources are another interesting plugin type. These allow flexibility in the template source. This allows Xanthia theme templates to either reside in the file system or the database. Templates in the database allows for online editing.

A cool use of a resource I have coming up for release soon is an updated HTML pages module that, via a custom resource in the module, I pass the contents of the HTML pages item from the database through the Smarty engine allowing you to use the full power of Smarty inside 'static' content.

Another plus for Smarty is extensive documentation including a specific section for designers.

* Smarty compiles templates in to PHP combined with HTML (a la legacy themes) ne a one off basis (depending on settings).

-Mark