Design Considerations
This section describes why certain design decisions were made for Zaapt
Use of Multiple Mason Component Roots
A while ago, I hadn't needed multiple-component roots and hadn't yet come across a problem that did. When I started thinking about it, I realised that using them for a CMS would be a great idea. And so it happened.
Out of the box, Zaapt includes the bare minimum HTML it can get away with. This means that there should be an easy way to override Zaapt's built in Mason components with your own - and luckily there is.
Using multiple component roots means you can automatically use all of Zaapt's model rendering and widget rendering components for free. But at the same time, if you'd like to customise any of them to your own liking just place a component with the same path and name in your own site's component root and Mason will automatically call it instead of Zaapts.
This means you can override the menu widget components to use <ul>s instead
of <div>s. You can place the author of a blog entry at the top instead of
the bottom. You can change all dates throughout the site by changing one
component and you can link to everyone's profile every time you want to show
their username. It's all just too easy.
(More to come...)
(Ends)
Back to the Index.