[21:27] bharat: mindless: ping
[21:28] mindless: hoy
[21:28] bharat: I've spent a lot of time over the past few days looking at the layout code
[21:28] bharat: and I've come to the conclusion that there's no way to give the layouts enough autonomy to do a good job while the modules are spoonfeeding it bits of pre-generated content
[21:29] mindless: hm
[21:29] bharat: our current situation where we have a common sidebar, which has some of its own hardwired logic for dealing with certain modules
[21:29] bharat: is controlled by $layout.show
[21:29] bharat: which in turn is controlled by GalleryCapabilities
[21:29] bharat: it's all a mess
[21:30] bharat: I think that if we really want to give the layouts latitude to make a nice presentation, independent of each other
[21:30] bharat: we have to let them do all the presentation
[21:31] mindless: meaning what?
[21:31] bharat: meaning that the layout knows about what modules are available for it and asks them for the information it wants, then renders it in the way of its choosing
[21:32] bharat: this means that the layout can be sure that everything looks exactly the way it wants (no strange/wonderful popup sidebar like slider has)
[21:32] *** Adi has signed off IRC (No route to host).
[21:32] bharat: downside is that new modules won't automatically show up in layouts unless we implement some kind of catchall mechanism
[21:32] bharat: But I'd argue that some of the sidebar content we have now is pretty useless, like the members and cart blocks
[21:33] bharat: if the layout knows about the search and random image modules that's at least half the battle right there
[21:33] bharat: right now the layout has to show any new modules that appear because it doesn't know not to show them
[21:33] bharat: ie, they'll just appear
[21:35] bharat: so for example, this would let the layout put the search box in the top right and leave the album selector on the left
[21:39] bharat: I'm envisioning using interfaces to get to the data so that at least we can have multiple implementations for an interface
[21:39] bharat: and then maybe those interfaces ship with core instead of each module
[21:40] bharat: so that at least we have a central concept of what interfaces are available
[21:40] mindless: ie, you want a blocks style thing like cms'es
[21:40] mindless: a layout can put the search block here, image block there..
[21:41] bharat: the problem with CMS style blocks is that they also assume a certain output format
[21:41] bharat: for the most part, blocks are only going to work with sidebars
[21:41] bharat: but layouts like siriux are never going to use a sidebar
[21:41] bharat: so how do we provide search for siriux? the only way that works (and isn't an egregious hack) is that siriux knows about search and provides its own search box
[21:42] bharat: if it did that, siriux could make a nicely integrated search box in the top right corner, for example
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[21:44] mindless_: it's not that hard to put a block wherever you want now.. albumselect actual shows how to do it in its site admin page.
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[21:44] mindless: man, my connection today has dropped 20+ times
[21:44] bharat: :-(
[21:44] jmullan: mindless: are you borrowing dsl from me?
[21:45] bharat: we can provide something similar that for other modules also
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[21:47] bharat: oy
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[21:47] bharat: do you want a pastebin of the convo so that you can see if you missed stuff?
[21:48] bharat: Mm. pastebin dead
[21:48] mindless: sure.. last i got was "so how do we provide search for siriux?"
[21:48] mindless: pastebin.ca?