Reflections, Skins -> Modifying the core?

[Justin Carter]

Hi All,

For a few days I've been tinkering with Containers, Reflections and
container Skins and have figured out how they work and the easiest way
for me to set them up (I think!). My problem is that I've hit a hurdle
in relation to using Reflections and Skins, which I then stumbled
across this bug (unimplemented feature?) in the tracker:
http://bugs.farcrycms.org:8080/browse/FC-313

The containers that I am placing into the page need to all be
completely interchangable, and the best way for me to manage them is to
create a handfull of Reflections (and use the defaultMirrorLabel
attribute in the container tag) so that the user does not need to
configure them every time they create a new page - however each
container needs to be wrapped in a chunk of HTML as well, depending on
the Reflection that was chosen.

As the bug says, I need to be able to choose a container Skin for the
Reflection when I set it up.

I think there are 2 ways I can work around it, but IMO neither of them
are ideal:

(a) I guess its possible to create an include that determines the name
of the Reflection used in the container and then for each case save my
chunks of HTML into a variable using cfsavecontent and pass those
variables in to the container tag using preHTML and postHTML
attributes, but I was really hoping I wouldn't have to hard code things
like that, especially since the Reflection names could change!...

(b) Some containers will use the built-in rules, others may use custom
rules... I guess I could just duplicate an existing rule that I'm
already using, such as the external links rule, and add the additional
HTML to the output, but it will just add clutter to the rules section
for the sake of some extra markup. On first glance this looks to be
better than option (a), but at least with option (a) I would only need
to choose a Skin -after- the feature was implemented and remove 1
include and 2 attributes from my code, whereas option (b) would require
each Reflection to be reconfigured because the rules would change!

So...

1) Am I missing something and/or is there a better way to do this, or
have I hit a hurdle in a feature that isn't yet implemented?
2) Would others like to see this feature completed?
3) If I was to attempt to implement this for my project (it's kinda
urgent), is it possible for me to make my own changes to the
container_xxxxx.cfm pages in the admin directory without affecting the
core? Is there any way to place these files in my own project folder
and have them override the core files? I've done a bit of searching but
come up empty handed, and there is currently a few other sites already
running FarCry that I don't want to break :P
4) Is this bug/feature large enough to warrant sponsoring if Daemon
were to pick it up?

If there is a way for me to override the core admin files them I am
happy to try making the change myself, but as I said I don't want to
affect (break!) the other sites on my web servers.

Thanks in advance for any advice :)

-- Justin

[Justin Carter]

Hmmm, let me summarise my last email :)

Justin Carter wrote:
> ...
>
> http://bugs.farcrycms.org:8080/browse/FC-313

>
> As the bug says, I need to be able to choose a container Skin for the
> Reflection when I set it up.
>

> ...
>
> 1) If I was to attempt to implement this for my project (it's kinda

> urgent), is it possible for me to make my own changes to the
> container_xxxxx.cfm pages in the admin directory without affecting the
> core? Is there any way to place these files in my own project folder

> and have them override the core files? (eg. by using a virtual directory?)
>
> 2) Is this bug/feature large enough to warrant sponsoring if Daemon

> were to pick it up?
>

Is anyone willing to have a crack at those couple of questions? This
feature is somewhat of a priority for me, but I'd also be interested to
know if others are hanging out for it as well. The ability to choose a
skin for a reflection makes them so much more powerful, and on face
value it doesn't seem like it would be too much trouble to add.

Cheers.

-- Justin

[Blair McKenzie]

I'm pretty sure that this kind of extendability isn't available at the moment. I know that I probably wouldn't have a lot of use for it.

Blair

[Justin Carter]

Blair McKenzie wrote:
> I'm pretty sure that this kind of extendability isn't available at the
> moment. I know that I probably wouldn't have a lot of use for it.
>
> Blair

Thanks Blair, I was pretty sure there wasn't a way to do it either but
I gave it a shot... I was hoping I could override the files with a
Virtual Directory, but then the relative paths meant it was looking for
core files below the directory that I had mapped, etc etc. And the
ColdFusion mapping confuses things as well :P

Justin