I'm not much of a programmer, I consider myself to be more a front end developer I prefer HTML and CSS and the odd bit of javascript.

I also love xoops because I find it very easy to customise, easy to customise themes and templates. I can customise most templates to suit whichever site I am working on and it is usually pretty simple using the modules provided smarty variables to generate the content and editing the HTML and CSS to suit.

Where it becomes a tad trickier is when a modules php code is generating HTML elements. I have to try and hunt down which code is generating which elements and figure out how to edit that code so i can add a class or id or whatever without breaking the module.

I realise alot of module devs probably already keep all functionality of the module completely seperate from the presentation/template side, but some dont and personally I feel it makes it so much more difficult to customise things.

I feel one of xoops great strengths is it's customisability, if you know some HTML and css you can pretty much get things looking exactly how you want on a site wide basis.

So what are your thoughts on this, should all HTML elements only be inside templates or is there a need to sometimes generate elements inside PHP code?

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That's what Smarty and templates are basically for

My understanding is that Core developers will try to move all HTML code out of PHP files and into templates, creating a very clean Core. Maybe they can speak more to it...

I hope, developers of new modules will follow the same direction. And that there will be also developers who could help us with cleaning up the existing modules as well.

BTW - take a look at the modules being developed for XOOPS 2.6, like the Banners that is done by Mage.

It has a very nice separation of form, templates, and code.

I think, these modules will be a good example how we should program new XOOPS modules taking advantage of the XOOPS API.

If you are testing a conditional statement, is is not uncommon to pass some HTML directly to a template variable. Once it all works, you should really just output a value and format the HTML using IF/ELSE in Smarty.

However, if you are drunk and tired and it works perfectly as it is, you just go to bed.

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That was a good one!