Jumping in with questions and answers

[pauamma]

I just came across To Answer, Or Not To Answer. The gist of it is: someone asked "Should I answer a perl question when I'm not sure of the answer or when I can only answer part of the question?" and got overwhelming "yes" answers (and very good suggestions on how to handle uncertainty), because even if your answer doesn't help the person asking, researching your answer (and thinking about the question) may well help you. So as an experiment, I'd like to try something similar in this entry:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in the discussion I linked to above.

If this works, I'll try to make it a regular feature of this community. (How often should it happen?)

Comments

[pauamma]

You can't call Perl code directly from templates, so you have 2 solutions, I think:
- have your controller pass variables to your template indicating which beta features the user has turned on. Then you can do something like [% IF uaerhasbeta.featurename %] [% dw.need_res( 'js/featurename.js' ) %] [% ENDIF %] (syntax not guaranteed)
- write a TT plugin (see cgi-bin/DW/Template/Plugin.pm and cgi-bin/DW/Template/Plugin/*) (being vague here, because I'm unsure of my footing)

Which is best depends on how many templates would need to test for beta features and whether this change is strictly localized to the templates, or if it affects the controllers as well.

[exor674]

or in this case, we'd extend the existing plugin. We really do not need multiple plugins for just one purpose.

[pauamma]

*nod* I wasn't sure whether we needed/wanted this, so thought it best to keep any plugin work separate.

[fu]

I like the first one! It's very simple, and is also easiest to find/remove later once something is out of beta.

[skakri]

So basically, .tt can access user information/settings? That sounds awesome, I'll try to implement "beta feature" detection in to my template.

[pauamma]

They can access anything the controller passes them. You would still have to add code to the controller to retrieve that info and pass it to the template.