Message styling

[chrislawlor]

Bootstrap alerts make a great fit for messages:

Becomes:

Usually, I'd do this by setting MESSAGE_TAGS to directly map message tags to bootstrap alert classes.

# Map django message levels to bootstrap alert classes
MESSAGE_TAGS = {
    message_constants.DEBUG: 'alert-info',
    message_constants.INFO: 'alert-info',
    message_constants.SUCCESS: 'alert-success',
    message_constants.WARNING: 'alert-error',
    message_constants.ERROR: 'alert-error',
}

but AFAIK there's no way for a third party app to define settings like this so that they only apply to the app.

I believe using LESS mixins to map default message classes to Bootstrap alert classes, as in the blog post linked by @sehmaschine here #125 (comment), would be a great way to approach this. The markup would be something like:

# base.html - simplified for clarity
{% for message in messages %}
    <li class="message-{{ message.tags }}">{{ message }}</li>
{% endfor %}

# style.less
.message-info {
    .alert
    .alert-info
}

message-success {
    .alert
    .alert-success
}
...

Obviously, this relies on moving to LESS for our styling. The discussion around this is mostly in issue #125.

[pydanny]

I think I want to see how @sehmaschine and @audreyr weigh in before deciding on SASS/LESS/COMPASS items.

[pydanny]

Not sure how to handle this. I would prefer this to be purely a theme issue, but I don't want developers working on the core library to have to know LESS.