Offer a set of skins, preventing uncontrolled growth

[Luca Bösch]

Please consider the following feature request.

Regarding skins, in Mahara 1.9, there are basically three options.

Disallowing everything.
Allowing everything.
Disallowing everything theme-wide.

I would like to propose a middle way in which a institutional designer would prepare some skins (which are in itself different, but adhere to the institution's CI/CD) the user could chose from. The user could not freely create and modify everything but all the same spice up and distinguish her/his own sites.

Best regards

Luca

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Thank you for your wishlist item, Luca. How do you imagine this to work? Do you imagine that there are certain "tags" in the CSS of a theme that would then disable certain elements in the screen where you can choose items for your skin? Or would they simply be ignored? Or would you want to be able to disable certain elements of the skin creator for the entire institution, e.g. to never show the "Advanced" tab? Or something entirely different?

[Luca Bösch (boesl2)]

Thank you, Kristina, for your question.

To me it seems it approaches your last guess.
I haven't thought it trough fully admin-side, I must admit, but to the user I think there is a simple way.

When only pre-prepared skins in an organisation would be offered, and self-creation (and importing, exporting) would be restricted, there was only a choice between some skins for the user's page creation.

The "Create Skin", "Import Skin", and (t.b.d.) "Export Skin" would be missing.
Maybe there wouldn't be a need for the skin pull-down choser and filter button either.

I hope to have explained my input better, like this.

Hopefully some experienced admin side expert has a simple idea of getting this done on the administration front-end.

Best greetings

Luca

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

Thank you for the clarification, Luca. So basically, you'd disallow users to create their own skins and they would only be able to choose from the existing skins. As far as I can see, you'd even want to restrict this further to only be able to use skins that were created by a site admin.

Currently, we do not have the possibility to create institution skins. So these would need to be implemented as well because if you have a Mahara instance that has multiple institutions set up, they would need to be able to select the institution skins and not only the site skins as those may be based on a different theme.

In the short term, you could set up multiple themes and enable "page themes" so that your users can select those for their pages, and then disable skins.