[development] Patches 4.8 - New Theme

[Adrian Simmons]

Trae McCombs wrote:
> Having a sane base that all themers can use to build thier theme is 
> what we should be solving.  I worked for a while on this with Ted 
> (m3avrck) and Robin (mozillaman) and we didn't get very far.
I've had a couple attempts at that sort of thing myself. But I've come to 
the conclusion it's not really possible. You're dreaming if you think you 
can create a single theme code base that fits even a large majority of 
drupal sites *and* looks really good. Fitting multiple uses requires making 
compromises and compromise leads to lowest common denominator design which = 
mediocrity.

Simon is right that a new core theme needs to start from a visual design if 
it's going to really look great. He's wrong if he thinks there can be only 
one. As has been said before truly great themes will only be possibly by 
focusing on the task the web site has to do - blog, brochure, community, 
e-commerce etc. You actually need a handful of base themes, not one, and 
that brings us back to the whole 'distribution' thing.

> It's easy to do the gfx, the hard part is hanging your CSS on a properly 
> built frame that Drupal doesn't barf on when it views forms, forums, 
> admin, etc....
That rather suggests you're gfx didn't encompass forms, forums and admin! 
Doing it properly means designing for *every* part of Drupal, and yes, 
that's a huge job and not something that one person is likely to take on.

So post a pretty design, post the inkscape files, post a specification, post 
a list of all the parts of Drupal that need themeing and thus need gfx mockups.

And make use of http://groups.drupal.org/group/themes

-- 
Adrian Simmons (aka adrinux) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com>
e-mail <mailto:adrinux at perlucida.com>