What about having a local user's template folder (in D&S\App Data) that is combined with the app-wide template folder to construct the total set of available templates?

BTW, newspaper views are optional, right? They can be turned off?

I figured you'd say that, but it was worth a shot. ;)

For some feeds I wouldn't necessarily want a newspaper view - I'd rather just have headline. I guess I could just resize the splitter, but would it remember that per-group?

If you're thinking about per-feed newspaper styles, then "no newspaper style" might be a good thing to include.

> ... The question is whether any user besides me will utilize all this configurability. :)

Oh they would :-) also, it need not be a pref... RSS Bandit could remember the last view used on a per-feed basis.

Also, here's a rationale for having "No Newspaper Style" for some feeds: from my (little) experience with FeedDemon, generating the newspaper view takes time, and there are feeds with long posts (many MSDN feeds) which I know I read regularly, and I'd rather my aggregator not spend time generating views for them when I know I'll be reading post-by-post.

Why would you want to write to program files?
Why not %app_data%\Rss Bandit\Templates

Requiring write access to the program folder is definitely a no-go. IMHO Kevin Dente's suggestion would be the best solution. But this is not so important. I could live without having the .fdsxl click-install at all.

If you decide to allow different newspaper views on different feeds, a "no newspaper" style as Kevon Dente suggested should be available as well.

I'll second what Kevin said about 2 locations but I'll take it a step further: conflict resolution.

This would allow the user to say if there is a duplicate file found in both places, default to using Application Data\RSSBandit or Program Files\RSS Bandit\Templates. This puts the file into one of two categories: user specific or system wide.

Having 2 locations would allow users to have their own customized versions of system-wide templates while quickly being able to switch back and forth between the 2 versions. A thought for system-wide templates would be to put them in the All Users\Application Data\ folder since it technically is "Application Data" that almost seems out of place in Program Files. That's more of a nitpick than anything but a program I use follows this approach and it doesn't seem like a bad idea.

It's a slight beast to implement something like that but it might not be a bad thing to think about for someday way out there in the future.

I personally like the unread newspaper view because it makes sense if it's to be read like a newspaper. Newspapers delivered daily are usually unread when you first get them but that changes throughout the day as you read something.

I also think that there is something to having a "read all posts even if it's severely slow and almost useless" view because there may be times where you don't care about the performance hit, you'd just like to see everything on one page.

"One thing I've noticed is that different feeds tend to benefit from different styles".
Having this configurable per feed is an excellent option. Most people may default to one newspaper view but some people may want to alternate. Having an "apply to all feeds" option would be wonderful as well because there may be times where you experiment on one feed then realize that you'd just rather use that view on every feed. Having to change each feed one at a time would be extremely tedious but it's not a huge stretch.

You probably have more feeds than I do by the look of the screenshots so it's good to know you're facing the same issues I am when it comes to large numbers of feeds and the information they contain. I trust your judgement on stuff like this so I'll know you'll make the right decision for everyone, not just a handful of people.

You'd have to do a bit of smart talking to convince me the best place to store templates downloaded from the web were a good thing to store in Doc-Settings/JoeUser/Application Data.

I grok the security issues though. Maybe this could go in Doc-Settings/All Users/Application Data and standardise install to dump default templates in there?

"The question is whether any user besides me will utilize all this configurability. :)"

I thought that per feed style sheets were a requested feature already...I think I saw that once while looking through the requests before I submitted some.