Angela Byron wrote:
A couple comments...
These themes need to be somewhere between "looks like Drupal" and "clean enough to build off of." What I see here looks like a full palate competing with the Drupal branding and the themer trying to find the shortest way to their own color scheme. It does look good, but too far from bluemarine to be a good default.
Too far from bluemarine is a *very good thing*!
a) Bluemarine is a table-based theme. It is 2006. CSS has been around since 1999? For all the cutting-edge web standards that Drupal supports, you would never know it by its default theme.
Yes, it should be tableless, I assumed that would be assumed by anyone working on this. I'm primarily concerned with the visual style and could care less what div soup makes it.
b) I don't know if you were around in Vancouver for this discussion, but Matt from WordPress pointed out that WordPress didn't start getting some really nice contributed themes until it started shipping with a nice default theme. Lack of good contributed themes has consistently ranked among the top 10 barriers to entry for Drupal; it's time we addressed the #1 issue impeding this.
I was there, and I've heard it numerous times before since Matt has mentioned it to me before. When I look at WordPress's default, Kubrik, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wordpress_main_theme.png, I see something relatively plain that I could leave on my site if I were lazy (many people have). Customizing the header is all that is needed for a good looking site that is mine. When I look at zen-beach I see - A header with way too little contrast and and arbitrary wavy gradient thing that confuses me. - Overly contrasting page borders and background. Yellow is a good color for highlighting things, not a default background. Yellow also doesn't fit with our color, which is blue (specifically, some sort of community blue, not to be confused with corporate website blue or WordPress blue :) ) - Headings with the same amount of margin above and below. - Quite contrasting primary links that flow out of their dark gradient and black line prison when I try scaling the font size up and some secondary links that seem to have wandered off and are trying to hide in the top right. - A breadcrumb trail that doesn't seem to want to associate itself with the current page, but would rather hang out with the global navigation. - An arbitrary serif font in the submitted by section. To be positive for a bit.. the rest looks okay for now if I can manage to focus on it.
c) As the drops and zen-beach theme illustrate, Zen allows you to completely re-style the look and feel of the site using only CSS. We're always talking about making Drupal easier to theme. Zen as a default theme would negate the need for designers to know _any_ HTML and PHP. This can only be seen as a good thing.
I'd expect this from any theme trying to get into core.
Things you will have a hard time getting past me: - Implementing any more theme functions than we have in the core themes at the moment. (see http://drupal.org/node/81217#comment-129980)
As someone who's worked on both the documentation side and the user support side, I actually am for including template.php with the default theme and including a few examples of overrides in it. Writing documentation and explaining to end users how the template.php file works is really challenging when there's no basis in core on how to use them -- people learn best by taking an example and modifying it to their needs.
One of our themes might have this, but I'd discourage it from being the default. I'm interested in us improving default themeable functions instead of overriding them with a default theme. -- Neil Drumm http://delocalizedham.com/