[development] Drupal 5 Themer Pack

[Victor Kane]

Am having trouble posting to your site, so will throw in my interest
to participate/approach here.

I have sort of a question first. Once I was doing a project for
someone who wanted to take advantage of the theme switching
functionality that Drupal has, while at the same time needing some
heavy theming (presentation functionality) common among all themes. I
had to make a module, because it was either a module or replicate
everything in all the themes to keep the theming and the theme
switching.

At that time I dreamed of a kind of "theming abstraction layer" around
the theming engine. A kind of phptemplate which had an
editable/extensible part around the theme engine itself, so that if
someone wanted, they could affect "all" themes (associated with the
theme engine of course). This kind of thinking might have something to
do with the speed problem also.

Anyway, that may or may not be possible/desirable for most, and I
think your idea is a great step forward to Drupal usability. I would
love to participate in some way. We already have touched on this in a
couple of Dojo classes (copying theme function to template file) and
it will be a wonderful (apprentice rather than dojo, with occasional
dojo help, I think) effort.

I think it would be better identifying a series of use cases (phpbb,
newspaper publishing, "community" (profile theming with custom css,
mypage theming, etc), software development collaboration site, what
have you.

Then people could pair/team together on a use case basis and do a fun
"treasure hunt" for what they need on the basis of the exercise you
are proposing. Once several get under way, that 90% is hit (it will be
a different 90%). Then some volunteers can do a mop-up operation.
Others can work on the optimization question. There will be a
continual process of refactoring on the basis of lessons learned (all
teams would publish their efforts).

I would like to work on a community/newspaper publishing effort (maybe
text columns, placement/theming of additional fields for the story,
feature pages, countless other things) and I would like to start from
the use cases, and as few modules as possible (maybe aggregation or
aggregation-type module or import type module (use of importexport
module) to import stories already written for hard copy into the web
environment), get the basic functionality going on a clean 5.0
installation, then do the exercise you propose.

And like Josh, you should make a group on http://groups.drupal.org/,
you won't have to necessarily lead it, or spend much time working with
it, but it would centralize our efforts and make it economical to work
together, choose pairs, groups, and report work done. Another
alternative (talk to Josh) would be just to use a thread on Dojo, but
it's all the same to most people I think.

Victor Kane
victorkane at drupal.org (for contact info)
http://awebfactory.com.ar

On 1/21/07, Earl Miles <merlin at logrus.com> wrote:
> Transferred from my blog at Dries' request. First, the blog post:
>
> > Today on drupal.org I just posted my 'personal battle plan' and it includes
> > a fairly large project .... called the Drupal 5
> > Themer Pack which includes every (or nearly every) theme function in Drupal
> > 5 core as a .tpl.php and the corresponding template.php code.