On 12/13/05, Trae McCombs <occy@occy.net> wrote:

I think half of the problems I encounter themeing different drupal sites
is with the different modules.  Every single developer out there wants
to code something in one way or another.  And they all want to use page
breaks (<br /> [yes, that is the proper way you print out a "<br>"
people!) in places where you, the themer, might not necessarily want
them.  So if you are themeing all the different form elements, you are
constantly scrambling for different classes and ID's to try and theme a
particular form to look a certain way.

Have you filed bugs against modules that use <br /> and/or suggested alternate approaches? If a module is outputting hard-coded HTML where it shouldn't, it's a bug.

The biggest bulk of a Drupal themers problem is, you typically can't
just theme, all generic selects, inputs, etc.  You have to specifiy
certain elements and my gosh, there can be tons and tons and tons of
them.  Ending up with a nasty huge giant amount of CSS.

Dries is right, it shouldn't be this hard to theme.  I should be able to
theme the header, sidebars, footer, content area, select, input, and a
few other things and be done.  But that is not the case.

Umm....sorry, but *why* can't you just theme those areas if that is all you want to do?

I'm really not too sympathetic to theming complaints, seeing as how I've seen something like 60+ sites launched in the past year with custom themes -- see http://www.aeropod.ca/ or http://www.netsquared.org for two examples off the top of my head.

*Design* is hard. A completely custom look and feel for your website is hard. Cross browser CSS is hard. Designing individual pages in HTML and uploading them via FTP is hard. None of these things have anything to do with Drupal.