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I quite like the Coa concept, and with the documentation and video I found it quite easy to grasp.
It makes a few things easy in Get Simple that seem to be really hard without it. One example is conditional templates. Without Coa, I'm not sure how I can check to see if I should be displaying a sub-menu, and provide extra markup around it if I am.
I don't like the obfuscated code in template.php. It causes a problem in the Theme Editor, because the template.php is an unreadable compressed nightmare that should never be presented to any user for editing, no matter how skilled they are.
I do wonder why the template.php file needs obfuscating. At a first glance, this strikes me as antithetical to open-source software as code inspection or modification is close to impossible. I might try running it through something like phptidy to see if that makes the code useable.
So, on some levels, I think Coa could be awesome. In my Coa themes, I'm going to try moving the code soup into an include that is hidden from the Theme Editor, leaving just a PHP include in template.php, and helpful comments about why the file is almost empty with links to the Coa documentation.
[edit] Thanks very much plue, for your work on this. It is a really innovative and interesting system.
It makes a few things easy in Get Simple that seem to be really hard without it. One example is conditional templates. Without Coa, I'm not sure how I can check to see if I should be displaying a sub-menu, and provide extra markup around it if I am.
I don't like the obfuscated code in template.php. It causes a problem in the Theme Editor, because the template.php is an unreadable compressed nightmare that should never be presented to any user for editing, no matter how skilled they are.
I do wonder why the template.php file needs obfuscating. At a first glance, this strikes me as antithetical to open-source software as code inspection or modification is close to impossible. I might try running it through something like phptidy to see if that makes the code useable.
So, on some levels, I think Coa could be awesome. In my Coa themes, I'm going to try moving the code soup into an include that is hidden from the Theme Editor, leaving just a PHP include in template.php, and helpful comments about why the file is almost empty with links to the Coa documentation.
[edit] Thanks very much plue, for your work on this. It is a really innovative and interesting system.
