[documentation] Manage inconsistency in themes

[Liza Sabater]

On Nov 09 2005, at 09:49 PM, Kieran Lal wrote:
> 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.
>

I'd love to see more code snippets.


>> 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

!?!?!
Where are these themes? I've never seen them. Are these the new ones  
Trae is working on?


> 5) Wireframe: http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/*checkout*/drupal/ 
> contributions/themes/civicspace/layouts/wireframe/screenshot.png

Still do not understand the concept behind this.


> 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.

Have these been debugged? Democratica, Spreadfirefox and Lincoln's  
revenge were really buggy last time I used them. I chose to start  
with Friends Electric instead of Democratica for the YearlyKos design  
for that reason:

http://www.yearlykos.org

> 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.

Totally.
I used MarvinClassic for my portfolio site

http://www.lizasabater.com

But found the tables a headache to modify. I've settled on a  
customized Marvin 2K for PHPTemplate for my sites. As I roll them out  
they will have the same layout, only different look and feel.

http://www.dailygotham.com
http://www.culturekitchen.com


/ liza
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