[themes] Re: Rapid Theme Development was: Re: [development] Administration Survey: Theme improvements, theme help system, theme mailing list

[Trae McCombs]

  /msg liza that $50 buck check is in the mail...

ooops. :)

Is this stuff hard?  Yes, CSS is a PITA.  But... I think half the time 
we (themers) have to fight the structure of the html 2 or 3 or 10 times 
in a battle of a theme because you are constantly pushing and pulling 
elements here and there.  (I'm in a heated battle right now with 
@#%!$%#%#$%#@$%#$% forms, labels and crap  ugh)

It probably doesn't help me to reply to these things when I'm super 
frustrated while working on themeing design.

It's too bad we can't get 2 or 3 people employed full-time to sit down 
and sort these issues (with the support of the community and feedback of 
course)  The problem is, between trying to make money to feed your 
family, and working on Drupal community issues, it's easy to just work 
with what we have and push the other things back.

I have no idea what I'm saying right now...

Am I the best CSS person on the planet?  No.  Do I have a full clue? 
No.  Am I 100% certified in all proper CSS technichs and whatever?  No. 
  But, and here is the sad thing, I feel I know probably more CSS than 
95% of the people out there.  (And when it comes to doing this stuff, a 
lot of time it's just hit and miss on getting things done correctly)

Sure, I know CSS well enough now to narrow things down to a very close 
scope to work on.  But what happens, and what I keep finding is the 
problem is... it's like pulling cards from the bottom of a house of 
cards.  You gotta be danged careful, or the whole thing will come 
crashing down on you.  That's not the right analogy... :/  More like, 
pull here or push there and it effects something somewhere totally 
unexpected.  ie. some module or some table or some thing somewhere else 
that it was unintended to mess with.

Someone give me a cup of happy happy joy juice!
Trae


Liza Sabater wrote:
> On Dec 13 2005, at 02:36 PM, Darrel O'Pry wrote:
> 
>> and if you could do something like array_sort($node->html) You could
>> have finer grained control through the ui for managing output added by
>> modules.
>>
>> If this is a completely absurd idea, please someone knock sense into
>> me.
> 
> 
> Wasn't it the point of blogs and CMS to separate design and content  
> from the code? If anything, Drupal needs to have some sense knocked  
> into it ;-) OK, that was a bad joke; with all seriousness though, I  
> believe Drupal needs to have core and module developers working with  
> themers on design and UI issues before launching off a new version of  
> the software.
> 
> Boris' comment does not take into consideration the need for  humongous 
> budgets or allocation of man-hours that go into theming  sites like 
> netsquared. I have no idea what happened to the new Air  America Radio 
> launch but supposedly the job was monumental.
> 
> MovableType and WordPress did away with the sapping of resources for  
> design and development. It's as if Drupal is trying to turn back  time. 
> There is really no honor in saying, "well, it's difficult so  I'll make 
> more money as a developer". How many developers are right  now pouring 
> millions of dollars into the coffers of Drupal for  further development? 
> Because that is what happened to MT (pre-VC  money) and now to 
> WordPress. They're not doing shabby because people  are more than happy 
> to give back or pay for something they know will  be easy to maintain. 
> And Yahoo! completely understands the importance  of 'ease' in the 
> development of new markets.
> 
> I'd like to see something as simple as each module having it's own  div 
> tag id so that if I need to change a form in one module, it will  not 
> wreck havoc in ALL forms. Also, I find it really problematic that  I 
> cannot change the help text on each module because it is encoded.  But 
> more importantly, the fact that I have to have advanced knowledge  of 
> PHP to customize templates and themes is, well ... it's really a  step 
> backwards in terms of design.
> 
> This is what I wrote on an earlier email that didn't go through :
> 
>> If there is one thing Drupal could spend a year sorting out and  
>> optimizing is this : Completely separating design from the code;  
>> especially when it comes to modules --whether they are contribs or  core.
> 
> 
> SNIP
> 
>> I've seen Trae's designs and his CSS rock. Good CSS design and  
>> development is extremely difficult to do when you are especially  
>> considering issues of backward compatibility. Why would it be  
>> expected of him --or any other theme designer-- to know advanced  PHP 
>> AND CSS (in that particular order) to customize their templates?
>>
>> Drupal has amazing potential, as I have said before, and I am using  
>> it because CivicSpaceLabs sold me on the idea. But please,  understand 
>> that, Drupal needs to spend at least a year working on  design alone 
>> --and you can't do that if the code is constantly  changing and the 
>> specifications for a quasi-bug free site keep  changing by the week if 
>> not by the day. Not because that's the way  it should be but because 
>> that is unfortunately how Drupal has been  developed --design is way 
>> too intermingled with the code.
> 
> 
> Trae is supposed to be working on making themes easier to implement,  
> redesign and customize for CivicSpace users. I honestly believe he  has 
> a point.
> 
> Best,
> liza
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-- 
Trae "occy" McCombs || http://occy.net/
       Founder - Themes.org // Linux.com
     CivicSpaceLabs - http://civicspacelabs.org/