[development] New Themes for New Drupal

[Angela Byron]

A couple comments...

> These themes need to be somewhere between "looks like Drupal" and  
> "clean enough to build off of." What I see here looks like a full  
> palate competing with the Drupal branding and the themer trying to  
> find the shortest way to their own color scheme. It does look good,  
> but too far from bluemarine to be a good default.

Too far from bluemarine is a *very good thing*!

a) Bluemarine is a table-based theme. It is 2006. CSS has been around  
since 1999? For all the cutting-edge web standards that Drupal  
supports, you would never know it by its default theme.
b) I don't know if you were around in Vancouver for this discussion,  
but Matt from WordPress pointed out that WordPress didn't start  
getting some really nice contributed themes until it started shipping  
with a nice default theme. Lack of good contributed themes has  
consistently ranked among the top 10 barriers to entry for Drupal;  
it's time we addressed the #1 issue impeding this.
c) As the drops and zen-beach theme illustrate, Zen allows you to  
completely re-style the look and feel of the site using only CSS.  
We're always talking about making Drupal easier to theme. Zen as a  
default theme would negate the need for designers to know _any_ HTML  
and PHP. This can only be seen as a good thing.

> Things you will have a hard time getting past me:
> - Implementing any more theme functions than we have in the core  
> themes at the moment. (see http://drupal.org/node/ 
> 81217#comment-129980)

As someone who's worked on both the documentation side and the user  
support side, I actually am for including template.php with the  
default theme and including a few examples of overrides in it.  
Writing documentation and explaining to end users how the  
template.php file works is really challenging when there's no basis  
in core on how to use them -- people learn best by taking an example  
and modifying it to their needs.

> - Styling form fields. These are notoriously inconsistent across  
> platforms and I think are best left as-is anyway since form fields  
> should always look like form fields.

I don't really feel strongly one way or the other on this point, but  
in looking around, it seems a lot of major sites catering to a  
general demographic (Amazon, Yahoo, etc.) have some sort of form  
styling going on, in their submit buttons if nothing else.

-Angie