Adrian Simmons wrote:
What we need IMNSHO are adaptable themes, not a separate admin theme.
Adaptable to what? Lost in this discussion is a notion of what is a minimum acceptable screen size for using Drupal. Statistics I've collected over the past month say that 800x600 screen size amounts to 11% of my traffic. Other recent surveys (Google on "screen resolution statistics") put the 8x6 crowd at as much as 29%. Several of my elderly friends have computers that are *capable* of displaying higher resolutions. What they don't have are *eyes* that can read fine print, so they choose to use 800x600. One of these elderly friends is actually a chief editor and contributor for one of the Drupal sites that I've created (www.mn-leon.org). So rendering on small screens --even in the "admin" sections-- is actually a significant issue for me. If Drupal fails to render properly on this screen size, then I suggest it is not the theme that is failing to be adaptable, but Drupal itself. Worth noting: The front page of drupal.org renders passably on 8x6 (Firefox/Mac), but has some unintended artifacts. Most pages render OK, but the project pages are pretty bad. Chris Messina wrote:
I spend 90% of my time theming the admin sections of sites and it's a waste of my time when 2% of users actually see it. We can greatly improve the overall user experience with Drupal if we focus on consistency and simplicity and while maintaining flexibility. ...
Amen to that... As the author of one of the themes that is broken in this way (greenthing), I made a conscious choice to focus my efforts on the end-user visible portions of my site and live with some bad rendering in the "admin" sections (which, on most of my sites, at least, aren't visible to anyone but me). I can control the *content* of my site so that it displays nicely in a given width. I can't control the admin section of the site so easily. If you continue down Adrian's road of insisting that themes be "adaptable" to arbitrarily wide content, then I predict you will continue to (a) continue to make choices that make Drupal unappealing to the small-screen crowd, and (b) severly limit the number of people willing to make the effort to create new themes for Drupal. -Eric -- Eric Scouten Photography | www.ericscouten.com (Drupal powered!) Fine art prints from the world of nature