[development] New Themes for New Drupal

[Walt Daniels]

What is wrong with my model (below) of what themes should be in a Drupal
release?

The themes that come with Drupal are there so that when you install a brand
new site something actually appears on the screen. Since the first thing the
installer has to do is get the site basically customized with the right
contrib modules, etc., some theme friendly to administration is essential.
After the site is basically working correctly, the next step is to make it
look "nice" for users. "Nice" of course depends on lots of things completely
out of control of Drupal developers. For a large corporate site they want a
very unique look and will hire a designer. Drupal does not need to cater to
them beyond making the theming engine easy to use. For a small niche site,
almost any theme will do as long as it can be easily tweeked to look
slightly different from right out of the box. Most of these will replace
Druplicon with their logo and perhaps pick a different base color. That is
easy to do with the current Bluemarine and hopefully just as easy with any
new replacement. One might make this slightly easier by allowing them to
customize colors by filling out a form, just like they currently replace the
icon.

There seem to be two different base themes, liquid and fixed, which various
people prefer for various reasons. There is no good reason for not having
one of each in the release so that people can easily pick one. Are there
other bases that might be important? One issue that has not been talked
about in this discussion is themes with heavy use of Ajax. Perhaps having a
base that supports it is another class of base theme.

Leave the rest of the theme business to our wonderful collection in the
Theme Garden and those available on external sites.