We should have proper theming support in MediaGoblin. We *kind of* have theming in MediaGoblin at present, but not really.

Okay, so the things that are needed are really:

Requirements:

• A way to install themes
• It should be easy to "build" a theme, which means we should be able to provide a staging area of sorts
  • Should be easy to place together the templates
  • Should be easy to add extra assets
  • Should be easy to roll these up into a tarball or etc
• Should be easy to "roll out" static templates into a directory that's served from apache

ie, you don't want all .png and css files for a theme to be served by apache/nginx, so you might have a file with something like:

  location /mg_themes {
    alias /srv/mediagoblin/themes/static/;
  }

and a line in mediagoblin.ini like:

theme_install_dir = /srv/mediagoblin/themes/static/

People could possibly push theme static content to something like this with such a command:

./bin/gmg install_theme coolthemebro.tar.gz

This might install the theme to something like:

themes/
themes/templates/theme1/
themes/templates/theme2/
themes/static/theme1/
themes/static/theme2/

• That said, the themes that come with MediaGoblin should get a "free pass" here maybe? There's no reason that we shouldn't include a couple of base themes, and there's no reason that someone selecting one should have to push

Questions:

• Should themes be plugins?
  • Pro: Could make use of infrastructure willkg is already using.
  • Con: Could allow themes to install way more than they should be able to, possibly even install malicious python code. (However, since templates can basically execute a good amount of python, you should only install templates you trust anyway.)
  • Pro: Plugins probably also already need a way to set up their own files, including templates and static files, so we could just use that
• How to make the staging area and everything work nicely and cleanly?
  • If we set up the config options, directories and stuff in paste.ini and mediagoblin from the get-go, it's probably pretty easy to do right, and we can have a ./bin/gmg rolltheme that rolls up everything in the user_dev/templates/ and user_dev/theme_static/ into the appropriate tarball?
• How to handle the "registry" of things correctly? (Again, plugin solution might actually just make this easy)

Right now (esp thanks to Elrond) we managed to have a nice transitional period between Mongo and SQL by having mongokit like queries via .find() .find_one() and .one() reproduction for SQLAlchemy. But it's time to remove those from the codebase. We should start removing all instances of those and replacing them with proper queries.