Posted by lewisnyman on July 23, 2010 at 3:48pm
Do you have some features you would love to see in a framework/base theme?
I've been thinking a lot about this, at the moment I use my own base theme, a kind of Frankenstein of zen, mothership and some bits from other themes I like, set up in a workflow that works for me.
I was thinking of making it more flexible, with many options to turn off or tone down certain things based on the project you are working on.
Here are some ideas I have for options and features:
- XHTML1.1/HTML5 switch
- Class remover - Imagine this like mothership, but more of a sliding scale, built into the UI. eg. You can choose to have odd/even classes if you need them.
- Modernizer - Add modernizer classes, for css3 fallbacks
- Optional 960 grid css - You wouldn't have to move to another theme to use a 960 grid system.
- Vertical baseline grid UI - This would be wicked, choose a font size and a line height and the system auto generates css to establish an em vertical grid.
Those are just the ones plucked out of my head at the moment, it would be great to hear some suggestions.
Comments
great suggestions
+1 to optional grid and vertical baseline grid. These two frameworks don't always fit the design, so it's nice to have them configurable.
I've been integrating 960gs into a theme and I'm finding it really difficult to work the idea of regions and blocks into it. I almost want to pull each block out of a region and assign it a grid class, instead of putting a grid class on a wrapper of blocks. The only other way I see around the issue is exploding the regions to match the grid, but this isn't very extensible. Have you managed to integrate 960gs into your own themes in a scalable way?
Probably in many ways Fusion
Probably in many ways Fusion and Adaptivetheme in one way or another solve these issues - Adaptivetheme in particular is like Mothership where you can tone down the CSS classes and the templates rip out a lot of markup, but not too much since its a starter theme and mothership actually disables some functionality. Fusion has very tight 960 integration, but it does it at the expense of clean markup.
I'm not sure if Fusion does the vertical grid, certainly Adaptivetheme does not, mainly because no client ever asks for it, not once in 5 years. Fusion has fonts and font sizes, and this is pretty easy to slip into Adaptivetheme in a subtheme (I'm actually doing it with our new line of commercial themes).
Adaptivetheme is based on a 960 grid and uses theme settings and the Skirn module. I spent a very long time experimenting with grids and how to make them work in this type of theme - wrapper divs form the main layouts and the padding is on the blocks and other non-block elements. Skinr writes width classes directly into the block wrapper if you want to line up blocks horizontally (I use mostly the 16 col with some 12 col classes).
Perhaps take a look at the Ninesixty theme which does a very good job of integrating 960gs, or Adativetheme and Fusion for rather more complex and completely different approaches.
Vertical Grids...
@Jeff,
Of course the client never asks for a vertical grid, they don't know what that is.
As the designer/developer it's your job to apply your expertise to the site.
Vertical grids are solutions, not features.
What your client would ask for is a comprehensible web site and the vertical grid goes some way to achieving that.
If there are themes out there that are doing some of these features already that's great, It's good to see how other themes achieve this and if it can be improved.
If all these optional features were integrated into one theme, you wouldn't have to learn a completely different workflow every time you wanted to try out something new or a client requests something specifically.
Also I came up with some other ideas: