Hello PrimeFaces,
the old themeroller and even the new theme designer share a problem:
The preview is only for a defined test page. Developers want a preview at their own page in a production ready environment. Very often i had to do many roundtrips into the editor since it did not looked good at the target website.
Workflow
- Decide some variables
- Test variables in preview test page
- Copy theme to own application and reload CSS
- Not satisfied - go back to first step
Solution
The best solution would be a JSF editor component like themeswitcher, themeroller to allow changing each individual variables while being at the target page to test.
The component can export this to a java class or json for database saving or download of the css file.
Big picture - simplification
We want to get more clients to use our shop system and so we need more color variations of the themes and we cannot invest too many hours to test-create a new color variation. It must be editable in our JSF administration and variables saved in the database.
Imagine the client itself can choose the theme, save its variables like colors, and define its menu mode. This is power for the sales team and reduces costs.
Primefaces could provide:
- JSF component editor - choose any purchased theme - select a color preset, edit variables and save own version
- JSF session bean to preview the selected theme with saved variables
- JSF change menu mode dynamically - Seems not possible since each theme has its own menu component. They would need to use the same base and have its renderer overriden depending on selected theme. Dont know if thats possible.
- JSF parsing of the CSS that include variables for production
Would it not save your own designer time when you create new color variations of a new premium theme?
Unecessary complexity
I have no intention to fiddle around with SCSS and i have 0 benefits using it.
Your designers at PrimeFaces can do this to create the necessary base. Why should the customer (us) do this?
That is the reason we are using JSF / PrimeFaces at first. Because we dont need to invest in style and CSS.
I only want to configure it in 30 minutes and be ready to go. This is the success of wordpress where you switch your themes in a minute.