Add a way to have plugin specific resources, such as its own CSS styling, independent of skin or theme

• Key: FOR-970
• Type: New Feature
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Gavin
• Component/s: Plugins (general issues)
• Affects Version/s: 0.7, 0.8
• Fix Version/s: 0.10

Description

It would be nice if plugins could be a little more independent of core skins and themes for plugin specific styling.
This could be CSS, or something else, I have only identified CSS needs at present.

Comments

[Ross Gardler]

Can you provide a use case for this. When would a plugin be used independently of skins/themes?

As things stand at present plugins can provide CSS class attributes for generated elements. These classes can then be defined in skincon.xml (for skins) or in the theme definition in themes. Can you describe why this doesn't work out for your use case.

[Ross Gardler]

I see the use cases now Gavin (via the linked issues) - thanks.

[Ross Gardler]

I had the same need when I built the ecs input plugin (in whiteboard). The index.xml page describes what I did (basically defined the available CSS and expected the user to provide their own CSS). I opted for this because, since we don't know the users skin/theme we can't really provide meaningful default CSS.

However, I see some defaults may be useful.

My initial thought is that the plugins could provide an "extra.css" or "extra-css.xml" file. These can then be collated when the plugin is installed at startup. The collated document is then embedded in skinconf.xml or a dispatcher contract as appropriate.

[Thorsten Scherler]

I think the image should come from something like FOR-970