developing Theme dependant on some plugins - questions

[robi-bobi]

I am working on my blog theme and I am in a process of trying to make my current blog theme available to all.

Important part of it is its custom startpage.

At the moment the content of startpage is changed by manually changing .tpl file (which is OK for me)

However, I would like to provide some better ways, for two reasons:
- I have 'featured' sections on my startpage when I post links to other sites. I would like to have a history of such pages and it would be easy to do so if I had database table which will hold all the data
- in order to make it easy to use, there should be some administration not requiring any html skills

So, it looks like the startpage would be dependable on statc pages plugin and also on my custom plugin for fetching featured items (is there something similar already in spartacus?)

The question is how do I do that without breaking the s9y structure of separation of themes and plugins?

What path do you suggest?

[robi-bobi]

some details on custom startpage
it looks like this:

[image] some text (this could be done with static page content, so no need for new plugin)

I recommend section:
(links that are recommended) - this is one of the items i am talking about - needs new plugin on which startpage will depend - it could have 'view history' of all recommendations

Latest blog entries (this does not require new plugins)

most commented entries last month (same as above)

Featured blog post
this has custom text and links to one featured blog post (probably needs new plugin) - it could have 'view history' of all featured posts

some custom text

the other problem with this is the complexity of things user would have to do in order to have that startpage ...

I hope that the reason for me asking this is clear - I want to prepare simple to reuse theme with custom looking startpage which will have some dynamic functions and I want it to be within s9y structure and guidelines

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

What about making your recommendations either be static pages (with a distinct template) or maybe blog postings in a specific category?

Since the latest patch to the staticpage plugin, which supports "custom static page properties" for each staticpage type, you could really dumb down the interface for recommendation-style links etc.?

This would then only require the user to have the static page plugin installed. There currently is no other mechanism to be used that contains plugin dependencies. You could only check those through the config.inc.php file of your template and give output on the configuration panel about missing plugins. If you craft your .tpl pages so that missing plugins do not destroy the whole output, then this would be a good way to g?

Just some thoughts.

HTH,
Garvin