[development] Drupal 5 Themer Pack

[Neil Drumm]

Dries Buytaert wrote:
> Improving the theme functionality in Drupal 6 is going to draw a lot 
> more designers to Drupal than a (temporary) themer pack, IMO.  Plus, it 
> avoids duplication of work and causes fewer upgrade pains.  Hence, I 
> plan to be working on separating out theme functions into .tpl.php files 
> for Drupal 6.  People that are willing to help, including you and/or 
> Ber, are more than welcome to.

I've done a bit of thinking about this. The first step I see is moving 
the variable setting from PHPTemplate to the core theme system. The key 
thing to realize here is that what is called from a module is not what a 
themeable function or template wants to receive. Node module likes 
calling theme('node') with a small number of arguments, but node.tpl.php 
  has a much larger set of variables.

The way I see this being implemented is adding a preprocessor step to 
theme(). If theme_foo_preprocess() exists, then that would be called 
with the original arguments and returns a larger set of, probably named, 
arguments. That function would be called in a themeable manner, so 
my_theme_foo_preprocess() could replace that argument preparation.

This would move a large chunk of code out of PHPTemplate into the core 
theme system where it belongs.

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com/