Rapid Theme Development was: Re: [development] AdministrationSurvey: Theme improvements, theme help system, theme mailing list

[Adrian Rossouw]

I am fairly certain I can make a large amount of improvements on the  
current process of building a theme, and I will be looking into them
in the drupal 4.8 cycle.


The biggest boost however is the phptal theme engine I have been  
planning since time immemorial.

The first theme I ever wrote for drupal was a system that used phptal  
templates, and allowed for template switching.
I called it Chameleon. Dries later stole my name for the theme we  
have in core now (although i don't think it should be
called chameleon. it's nowhere near flexible enough).

The benefit of the phptal system, is that your html mockup, IS your  
final template.

You can open it up in dreamweaver, and change it however you see fit.  
You just add the right xml tags in the blocks you
want to either define as theme functions or replace with variables.

When i think about it, I could probably write an ajax tool to turn  
any static html mock up into a template, although practically  ..
you obviously need to have enough blocks in your page for all the  
elements.

I stopped developing the engine, as phptal was incredibly slow with  
php4. The php5 version is a lot faster though,
probably the same speed as phptemplate.



On 13 Dec 2005, at 4:52 PM, Trae McCombs wrote:

> The point is... you shouldn't be using page breaks to format the  
> output of your module or form.  That's why God created CSS.
>
> Trae
>
> Álvaro Ortiz wrote:
>>> another.  And they all want to use page breaks (<br /> [yes, that  
>>> is the proper way you print out a "<br>" people!)
>> Mmm... it just depends on the DOCTYPE you are using. I use HTML  
>> 4.01 in many
>> sites, so a <br /> would be wrong for those cases.
>> álvaro
>> --
>> http://www.popmadrid.com
>> http://furilo.com
>
> -- 
> Trae "occy" McCombs || http://occy.net/
>       Founder - Themes.org // Linux.com
>     CivicSpaceLabs - http://civicspacelabs.org/

--
Adrian Rossouw
Drupal developer and Bryght Guy
http://drupal.org | http://bryght.com