On Tue, August 29, 2006 2:22 pm, Jeff Eaton said:
At absolute worst... Does anyone have feelings about replacing some of the old-and-crusty additional themes that we include with Drupal? Even if folks are absolutely desperately attached to bluemarine, how many folks are there out there who say, "You'll take away Grey Box when you pry it from my cold, dead, hands?"
There are absolutely some improvements to be made -- the themes are being shown to us *while *they're in development. But when I see people talking about 'pizzazz' and 'sexiness', I sometimes cringe. A good foundation, plus good CSS, plus pizzazz. It doesn't go the other direction. I made some of my own complaints about the colors, the layouts, the tweaky little details...
Must a new theme be the second coming of Zeldman, rather than a very strong foundation plus iterative improvements? :) I like BlueMarine, but it shows its age in a big, big, big way. If you dislike the themes demonstrated, what do you LIKE about BlueMarine? I'm very curious...
--Jeff
What I like about BlueMarine: - It's ugly. Really. I KNOW when I'm working on a site setup or when using it to buid a new module that I am not looking at the final look. I'm doing a prototype. Building the theme for it comes later, and I can very easily tell that I'm working with a placeholder. - It works with everything. When developing a new module, all I need is a place to do the basic layout of the module's UI. I don't need or want to deal with fixed width silliness or float problems. I just want to say "And now this generates a form, followed by a table, and for the rest, punt." - It's simple. OK, the CSS for Drupal is anything but simple, but that's getting better. :-) The stock .tpl.php files, though, make it very easy to see what's going on and how the basic layout is achieved. It's a good learning tool. - It's simple. There's no flashiness to get in the way of me looking at what I'm actually doing rather than the design. Distracting people from the content with flashy graphics is a job that comes later, after the content and code is figurd out. OK, maybe those aren't the best qualties in a "default" theme, but it's certainly good qualities in a "developer-friendly" or "learning" theme. Right now, those are the same thing. Whatever we do with the default, let's keep in mind the latter factors. --Larry Garfield