[drupal-devel] Admin theme

[Álvaro Ortiz]

> Id like to pull this discussion out of the general usability improvement, 
> because I feel this needs LOT of thought before it even close to ready.

Some ideas that come from my experience setting up Drupal in different 
environments, and general thoughts:

* I would not need a complete new admin theme. I just need to theme 
slightly different some pages; the CivicSpace approach of checking if 
we're in an admin page and serving a different stylesheet is great.

By default you would get a basic admin stylesheet which you could use or 
not. Integrating the admin layout would be easy if you design your 
custom theme (you would inherit it, as you do now with basic styles in 
misc/drupal.css). Moreover, you may inforce good practices in CSS 
codign, as people may follow or extend this basic CSS for its own purposes.

* is_admin() would need a list of regexps, that I would also provide by 
default. Then, if you want to have certain page the frontend layout you 
would only need to remove from the regexp list. And viceversa. (Although 
I sometimes find regexps not too flexible or easy to use...)

Regarding blocks:

* When you enable a block you usually want it in the "public" (frontend)
area or in the "private" (backoffice) area, but rarely in both. You now 
have a left sidebar zone and a right sidebar zone (and the new ones): I 
would make use of something related, an admin area (a more suitable name 
  surely may be found).

By default, when you create a block you must choose in what area you 
want it to show: frontend, back, or both (for the backoffice you would 
make use of the previously commented list of regexps, and you would not 
need to copy&paste the same list for every block).

And this idea might lead us to the concept of subtemplates or subthemes, 
as other CMSs have, but I guess is a completely different topic 
(although in someway related, as you could consider this whole admin 
thing as a subtheme...)

cheers,
álvaro
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