Am having trouble posting to your site, so will throw in my interest to participate/approach here. I have sort of a question first. Once I was doing a project for someone who wanted to take advantage of the theme switching functionality that Drupal has, while at the same time needing some heavy theming (presentation functionality) common among all themes. I had to make a module, because it was either a module or replicate everything in all the themes to keep the theming and the theme switching. At that time I dreamed of a kind of "theming abstraction layer" around the theming engine. A kind of phptemplate which had an editable/extensible part around the theme engine itself, so that if someone wanted, they could affect "all" themes (associated with the theme engine of course). This kind of thinking might have something to do with the speed problem also. Anyway, that may or may not be possible/desirable for most, and I think your idea is a great step forward to Drupal usability. I would love to participate in some way. We already have touched on this in a couple of Dojo classes (copying theme function to template file) and it will be a wonderful (apprentice rather than dojo, with occasional dojo help, I think) effort. I think it would be better identifying a series of use cases (phpbb, newspaper publishing, "community" (profile theming with custom css, mypage theming, etc), software development collaboration site, what have you. Then people could pair/team together on a use case basis and do a fun "treasure hunt" for what they need on the basis of the exercise you are proposing. Once several get under way, that 90% is hit (it will be a different 90%). Then some volunteers can do a mop-up operation. Others can work on the optimization question. There will be a continual process of refactoring on the basis of lessons learned (all teams would publish their efforts). I would like to work on a community/newspaper publishing effort (maybe text columns, placement/theming of additional fields for the story, feature pages, countless other things) and I would like to start from the use cases, and as few modules as possible (maybe aggregation or aggregation-type module or import type module (use of importexport module) to import stories already written for hard copy into the web environment), get the basic functionality going on a clean 5.0 installation, then do the exercise you propose. And like Josh, you should make a group on http://groups.drupal.org/, you won't have to necessarily lead it, or spend much time working with it, but it would centralize our efforts and make it economical to work together, choose pairs, groups, and report work done. Another alternative (talk to Josh) would be just to use a thread on Dojo, but it's all the same to most people I think. Victor Kane victorkane@drupal.org (for contact info) http://awebfactory.com.ar On 1/21/07, Earl Miles <merlin@logrus.com> wrote:
Transferred from my blog at Dries' request. First, the blog post:
Today on drupal.org I just posted my 'personal battle plan' and it includes a fairly large project .... called the Drupal 5 Themer Pack which includes every (or nearly every) theme function in Drupal 5 core as a .tpl.php and the corresponding template.php code.