factoryjoe, Your idea of "shareable layouts" and semantic layouts has a word already; widget. Isn't that true? Here you have touched on an important point - Drupal doesn't do widgets well. The widgets that we have now are the form_xxx functions in common.inc, but almost nobody ever uses anything but the default widget. Why? Because it is too hard to get overriding theme functions into your code and you can't share them easily. When I read your description of a "Person" layout, I think more immediately to date selectors. We have this really great event module which has a crappy way of entering dates. Much better would be one of the dozens of nifty calendar widgets that people have coded on SourceForge. Those are widgets. What I'd expect from a widget is that I can find it in a repository on Drupal, understand from a png what is it, drop it into a directory on my Drupal install, and activate it on a site/module basis (kind of like HTMLArea does with textareas). This is impossible now because the widget would have to belong to a theme or module to get included. The best widgets available in the Drupal world at the moment are the field.incs of flexinode, and it demonstrates what can happen if the widget loading mechanism is abstracted. I contributed a color picker (don't know if anyone ever used it) which is a perfect example of what I mean. There are many other ways to do a color picker, and anybody could contribute them too - just give them a different name and drop them into the flexinode/contrib dir. Then when it comes time to choose a color, there is a choice of tools on how to get the job done. There are a couple things we'd need in order to make our theme system widget aware. First, we'd need a widgets directory (naming open) that gets scanned and the file paths saved in system. Widgets can only work if they are drop-in code, not dependent on being loaded from a specific theme. Then we'd need a way of making a theme method widget aware. There is currently a hierarchy of places Drupal looks when looking for a theme('widget', x, y, z) function. It should be possible, probably from the administrator UI, to activate widgets that would then be pushed to the front of the line in this hierarchy. Widgets need not be limited to input forms or interactive UI elements. Anything with a theme method could take a widget. Like the Person example - there could be several Person widgets, each of which put the "name" and "picture" in different places, etc. Adrian was messaging me some of his ideas for the future of Drupal theming and it sounded like this sort of functionality was definitely a part of it, so perhaps he'll chime in with his views. As for the regions that chx and Ber are working on, I see that as completely separate to widgets, but that the two of them go hand-in-hand for making Drupal even easier to theme. cheers, Robert