[thesite] Re: [Admin] alternate color schemes

rudy r937 at interlog.com
Sat Jan 20 22:25:35 CST 2001


> once you're logged in we could set it up so you could pick
> some favorites and flag certain ones as ones to pick from
> when creating your session and the color scheme for that session.

the design of the SCHEME table is so that each logged in user can have
multiple schemes

    SCHEMEID      NUMBER(8)
    SCHEMEUSERID  NUMBER(8)
    SCHEMENAME    VARCHAR2(50)
    PRIV          NUMBER(1)

the PRIV field, if you recall, is to let you designate who gets to see your
schemes

so all we need is another column

   FAV   NUMBER(1)

then upon login, the query just chooses the user's scheme for the session
by picking one at random from all the ones where FAV=1

that way, if i have one that i consistently want to see, i would only have
one marked as a favourite (cool, eh?)

i leave it as an exercise for you Usability students to decide how to
arrange things so that something intelligent happens if a user defines a
bunch of schemes but designates them all with FAV=0

> rudy, wanna take a look at the necessary changes to the
> architecture to support this idea?  i certainly think it's worth
> the extra effort.

no problem, i just did   ;o)

i would also like to answer another point...

> : Right now,
> : the site loads with the default and doesn't switch to
> : a custom style until the post-log-in reload.
> :~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> that is correct, otherwise we get too many database hits for
> those people that aren't logged in (it has to re-query for every
> page hit, which is a bad thing).

i agree about the bad thing aspect of requerying

however, we are currently showing a static html home page, nicht wahr?

shurely we can apply the same kind of thinking to have a "default" scheme
(something along the lines of an external css file, right?) where the
choice about what goes into the default css file is altered as often as we
currently alter the current static home page (how *does* that happen,
anyway?)


rudy






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