I think you are covering the appropriate mailing lists. If you'd like to chat in real-time about hacking appdb, channel #winehackers on irc.freenode.net is a good place. Tony, Jon and myself are frequently there and chat at least every other day about appdb related things.
About the templates, is this what Jeremy did in the lostwages archive(www.winehq.org/cvsweb/lostwages)? I wasn't too familiar with the changes he made and thought it would be good to discuss things prior to making such large changes to the appdb code. Anything that improves the design is more than welcome.
Chris
From: Stefan Pflüger stefan@homepage4us.de Date: 2004/12/22 Wed PM 02:33:18 EST To: wine-devel@winehq.org CC: cmorgan@alum.WPI.EDU, appdb@winehq.org Subject: Re: AppDB TODO update: Templates
Basically, I'll implement a class that is able to read a template file and that can assign content to special tags in there.
The index.php would create an object of this class using a "main template" that includes all parts of the page that are static (header, footer, the main html tables). Depending on a GET variable, the index.php calls a function whose returned data will be used as the main content, it would be for example index.php?action=browseapps to get to the "Browse Apps" page.
The content of the sidebar, the banner ad etc. would also be created by a function like it's already done (see banner_display() in include/banner.php), but instead of just echo-ing this somewhere in the right place, it would also be fed into the template engine that again replaces the corresponding tags in the main template. Those functions might also use the template class to implement their own sub-templates.
In the end, the template class object in index.php should have the complete output ready for sending it to the user.
Hopefully, my short explanation was good enough to illustrate the concept.
Stefan
PS.: What's the correct list/address to send mails concerning this discussion to? I'm sending them to the wine-devel list atm, CCing to Chris Morgan and appdb@winehq.org...