We're implementing an CMS based on ASP.NET MVC. Now, any designer should be able to provide themes for this CMS. But to write a theme, they need to be able to modify the generated HTML, thus the concept of View. In other words, they should be capable to either modify current views, or create new views from scratch, to fit their requirements. However, now we're not sure that we're taking the right path.Should a web designer (HTML, CSS, JavaScript + Photoshop) really know about server-side platforms like Razor or PHP, or classic ASP, or anything else?
Should a web designer know server-side coding?
mvc;web design;server side
Yes, A web designer (a good one) knows about templating engines and can learn new ones.You cannot expect him to understand your bloated smart templates. As long as your templates are dumb and driven by simple data you can expect him to learn your particular templating engine. Of course he'll bill you an extra day for learning it, but that seems fair to me.We're also talking about simple templating engines like HAML that are one-to-one mappings. Expecting your web developer to understand your HTML helpers, your custom HTML helpers or your web controls is a different game. You should also not expect him to go read some code behind that renders html directly as a string.As long as your templates are isolated from code, logic and are thin abstractions on HTML, it's fair.