[documentation] Manage inconsistency in themes

[Kieran Lal]

On Nov 9, 2005, at 3:49 PM, Boris Mann wrote:

>
> On 9-Nov-05, at 3:33 PM, Kieran Lal wrote:
>
>> On Nov 9, 2005, at 2:21 PM, Richard Archer wrote:
>>
>>> Does the theme have bugs in display?
>>>
>>> Does the theme have cross-browser problems?
>>>
>>> Do two themes I want to use put elements in different and
>>> inconsistent place on the screen?
>>
>> Based on feedback we believe it is these three.  We can still go  
>> back and do some more research, but a quick review of bugs posted  
>> against these themes and discussions with themers make it clear.
>
> I think I've said this before. I'm not averse to have a FAQ for  
> these questions...but they are absolutely out of scope for Drupal,  
> since they are mainly CSS/browser bugs (i.e. it's not anything in  
> Drupal itself). I realize that this IS the user interface for what  
> most people deal with, so it is a high pain issue, but I see us  
> having a very hard time actually solving anything.

I am going to ask Trae McCombs to jump in here and write a page of  
how to manage your themes.  He inherited the CivicSpace theme from  
Chris who did a lot very innovative things first with Democratica and  
then the CivicSpace themes.

Full-time themers like Trae have developed a suite of techniques for  
theming that I believe will go a long way to helping people debug  
their custom themes.  These include tools that are built into Firefox  
to identify CSS classes, validating xhtml of contributed modules, and  
even paid services like browser cam that can help with identifying  
cross browser compatibilities.

> One thing I would like to suggest is a focus on verifying/marking  
> themes as compliant. e.g. Bluemarine, box grey, etc. (base, but  
> somewhat crappy themes) work perfectly across browsers. Many themes  
> that use high degrees of CSS-fu will/are plagued by continuing  
> cross-browser issues and/or workarounds. Maybe just update the  
> description of these theme projects to indicate as such? If themers  
> used box grey or bluemarine as a base to develop further themes,  
> perhaps we would have less issues. In some ways, that is what the  
> base CS theme is trying to do BUT it is too complex for the average  
> person to just extend slightly. A really nice, bare bones,  
> tableless CSS PHPTemplate would go a long way....

I think CivicSpace is moving in the direction of becoming a powerful  
toolkit for building tableless themes.

The CS theme now supports several layouts:
1) Columbus: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/columbus/screenshot.png
2) Declaration: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/declaration/screenshot.png
3) Federation: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/federation/screenshot.png
4) Republica: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/republica/screenshot.png
5) Wireframe: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/wireframe/screenshot.png

Giving people the layouts they want right out of the box is a good  
way to help them not have to learn advanced CSS to use a tableless  
theme.
The CS theme also provides a range of Styles: http://cvs.drupal.org/ 
viewcvs/drupal/contributions/themes/civicspace/styles/ so people  
don't have to be CSS masters.

I think doing as much of the theme customization on a powerful base  
is what people really want.  Once you have a layout and style you  
just need a simple custom.css class to override colors and graphics.

Of course the most advanced theme can not help with bad xhtml from  
contributed modules.  The forms API should be able to fix a lot of this.

We should have a page on managing theme inconsistencies up shortly.   
Hopefully, it will become a collaborative effort.

Cheers,
Kieran

>
> --
> Boris Mann
> Vancouver 778-896-2747 San Francisco 415-367-3595
> SKYPE borismann
> http://www.bryght.com
>
> -- 
> [ documentation | http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/documentation ]

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