[development] Theme patches

[Earl Miles]

Dries Buytaert wrote:
> Hello world,
> 
> I'd like to invite/encourage you to help test and review the following 
> issues:
> 
>   http://drupal.org/node/137236

This patch has been committed! Rejoice! This is a very, very serious patch for 
all developers, because it lets you take that extra step toward truly 
separating your logic from your presentation in a way that Drupal has tried to 
do in the past but been a little bit awkward. Every module developer is going 
to need to be aware of this patch in order to truly make the most out of Drupal 
6 theming.

It's going to need some serious documenting, too, because it rewrites all the 
documents about how template engines work and how modules and themes utilize 
theming functions.

 >   http://drupal.org/node/137211

This patch still needs testing -- I just rerolled it for HEAD, and now would be 
an excellent time. I'm going to disappear Monday evening for awhile (the baby 
is overdue and we're inducing Monday if she doesn't come over the weekend) and 
this could really use some quality testing while I'm around to make tweaks.

This patch is particularly important for a couple of reasons:

1) It'll remove reliance on 'page.tpl.php' for a theme to be a phptemplate 
theme; it'll give more transparency into what a theme really is by looking at 
the .info file (because the engine will be specified there. No guessing!)

2) You will be able to have true inheritance of themes with no directory 
hierarchy requirements. This means that the appropriate way to tweak a theme 
will be not to edit that theme at all, but to make a new theme, inherit the 
original theme, and then put in your new templates and stylesheet 
modifications; this will make it easier to keep your theme up to date as the 
author posts new releases.

It will also make it easier for your site to have more sub-themes that are just 
tweaks of existing themes. And this theme hierarchy can be multi-level, too.