[drupal-devel] phptemplate in core?

[Steven Wittens]

>> The (PHPTemplate-based) theme that I would like to see in core more
>> than any other is FriendsElectric.
>
> FriendsElectric is a good candidate indeed.  Let's see what Steven has 
> to say about this.

The only big issue with this is that FriendsElectric does not render 
pages with wide tables correctly. This is because of the tableless 
layout. There is also a problem when the left sidebar is longer than the 
rest. I've been unable to come up with a good solution for this, as 
something in the theme triggers a weird Mozilla fieldset stretching bug 
when I try the conventional way to fix it.

Typically, overflow: auto; is used to make scrollbars appear on wide 
content, but this doesn't really work for big tables like we have in Drupal.

Really, tableless CSS simply does not mesh with a complicated system 
like Drupal. Sure, it's doable for a limited site with a limited amount 
of options. But as a generic theme for a CMS? I have my doubts. It is 
trendy, and a very viable option for blogs and other simple sites, but 
the fact that 99% of all tableless designs can't even handle clears 
inside them says enough about the robustness of the whole thing.

The world would be a much better place without IE: then you could 
actually use the table-layout model through CSS. Every other browser 
that matters supports it as far as I know.

Finally: if FriendsElectric goes into core, who will maintain it? 
Putting the theme into core gives it a much higher exposure, but are any 
of you willing to handle the CSS that tableless layout requires? Or will 
it just mean more support requests to handle?

Steven Wittens