Where do I go, what do I do?!

Great idea. Please put me on the mailing list. I'm prepared to do some heavy lifting if needed.

This sounds like one of the best "feature" type plans for Drupal 6 thus far. As a PHP and CSS newbie, I can assure you that this will be very much appreciated. Drupal's theming functions are fairly easy to move around (editing Bluemarine type themes for personal use, etc.), but the actual making of a theme is, as far as I'm concerned, unintelligible.

This will make things a lot easier, I hope that this gets worked on.

Sounds like a great idea and something I can actually help with. Two things on my personal list are to become a 5.0 theme ninja and contribute more to Drupal, so this is a perfect place to start.

Earl, for Drupal 5.0, Vlado, Adrian and myself spent a couple of weeks trying to move all theme functions out of the modules into stand-alone phpTemplate files. The idea is that designers should simply copy the template file and start modifying it, rather than having to convert a module into a theme themselves.

We created a script that does just that -- and that got us 95% there. It removes the theme functions from the modules, converts them to template files, and stores the template files in the module-specific directories.

It all worked (except for the last 5%), but the problem we ran into is that it turned out to be 10% slower.

I'm hoping you and others can pick up the work (with help from us), and help us get this _in_core_. I think this is a case where we are better of changing the default behavior. It makes too much sense not to do it in core -- plus, we already started working on it.

What needs to be done is "simply" this: we need to make it 10% faster. :-)

Let's talk more about this on the mailing list?

I'm in the process of outlining a project/lesson plan for the Dojo. Essentially a real world 'how to build a Hyperlocal Media Network' (could be more of a newspaper/publishing platform) - cover all aspects from planning, development, to marketing and fundraising (ie giving back to drupal). All learning materials, courseworks, modules, themes, and the products/distros themselves would be available to the community.

Theming/templating and how to best utilize modules such as views and panels would be big parts of the project, so possibly there are opportunities to integrate some of your projects/battle plans into this sort of Dojo/lesson framework?

I'll post the outline on the relevant Drupal sites when its a bit more coherent.

Great stuff, Earl - Thanks!

I have sort of a question here (and some proposals also). 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@drupal.org (for contact info)
http://awebfactory.com.ar

As a designer, all these new projects sound like a blessing.
Figuring out what is themable -and to what extent- has often been a problem to me.

I really think you need to outline how you see this project as being different from Ber's Sympal 'theme' :)
I'll post further comments to the list.

instead of looking through 10 tons of drupal nodes / mailliste / own notes hidden under coffey stains it would be pretty f*cking nice to hear a collection of files just to dig in

So count me in :)

From a UI point of view, what we need is a theming wizard, that will allow the theme developer to visually select the theming function from the right file.

This is interesting, but I'm not sure how useful it would be. One thing that might be useful is to create small packs of alternatively themed core functions that focus on changing just a specific part of Drupal. Sort of like a library you could import.

the idea is not bad. I would however rather use external forum on the basis of phpbb. There you have at least no problems with templates.

Sounds like a great idea and something I can actually help with. Two things on my personal list are to become a 5.0 theme ninja and contribute more to Drupal, so this is a perfect place to start.