Lens, a skin for version 2 of PmWiki,1 was the most complex web design project that I’ve done to date. It took several months and a lot of swearing to develop. It’s modular, which makes it unusually easy to customize. It is also:
- Web standards compliant,
- Forwards and backwards compatible,
- Accessible,
- Adaptable to multiple levels of expertise, and
- Centralized, which makes it easier to modify and update.
Customizable
OP really was very serious when he said this theme is highly customizable. Thanks and great job! –RS
Compliment posted on my skin’s page at PmWiki’s official site
My top goal when writing Lens was for ordinary people to be able to customize it without having to learn any programming. XHTML and CSS are a cakewalk compared to a serious programming language like C, but many people still find it difficult to make one or two small changes to an otherwise ideal design without having to dive in headfirst.2 So Lens stores a lot of itself (for example, the contents of the sidebar) in the wiki rather than in the template file. It has many built-in style options to choose and learn from. And of course you can dig into the guts and tweak the code by hand if you want to. Continue reading
- PmWiki is a wiki engine which makes a pretty good general content management system, especially back when I had a webhost that included PHP but not database access. I like wikis a lot for the simple text markup, how easy it is to make links within the site, and the built-in version history. ↩
- Web page layout is harder than it has any right to be, both because the ideas are hard, and because there are so many tricky rendering differences and quirks involved. ↩