Pop quiz, hotshot. Your team has undertaken a project to completely redesign your web site. Fancy-pants designers are hard at work generating not one but three new designs. The designs will be put through a battery of usability tests, after which the best parts will be combined into the final design. They need you to create server-side logic that will populate content areas, navigation, and various design elements according to how the user manipulates the site. But the HTML is nowhere near finished, and the designers will be tweaking it right up to the day of the test. What do you do?
Your normal workflow is shot. Typically you receive finished HTML from the designers, break it down into reusable components, add template tags to represent program objects and logic, and prepare the whole thing to be run through a template processor to generate output. That's out. Any attempt to mess with their HTML will be counter-productive. The priority here is to perfect the design for usability testing, and that means rapid iteration in visual design tools. Template tags will get in the way.
The time crunch is serious. They need a functional prototype to test with, but you can't embed the functionality into the template. They're holding your templates hostage.
My solution: Shoot the hostage.
