Bruce's Blog

   Hopefully this will be a little safer topic then my last two posts.  I was thinking that with the advent of XPages, all kinds of new and exciting applications are going to either be created and/or updated on OpenNTF.  I'm am currently playing with TaskJam, XPages Phonebook, & XPages Wiki on a test V8.5 server.  I'm loving what can be done with them and how they look.

   However, there is one issue I would have with moving them into my production environment (once I had a production V8.5 server that is).  The current design of all three applications (at least it looks likes it to me) is based on them being standalone websites (like IdeaJam.net is).  I would like to have some common branding across all of my internal website (which is currently Domino-based, although the code is atrocious V6 0, I hacked alot of it together so I should know - lol).  If we had some kind of central Theme Manager Application that could hold "global" css and images resources that other applications could reference it would be easier to make everything look like it was all part of the same website.

   I was thinking this would be done in similiar fashion to how a number of OpenNTF applications are now coming with the ability in the configuration of the application to choose wether to use the OpenLog application for all logging functions.  I know this would be more difficult because the application would have to be designed so it could either run as a standalone website or as part of a whole enterprise-wide website.

   I think I'll leave this idea for now and come back later with some thoughts on what the Theme Manager application would need to do.

UPDATE
My other related posts on this subject
Part 1 - Background
Part 2 - Signing Applications
Part 3 - Replicating Templates