themes

Un-theming Zen is getting a little old, so we're looking at settling on a company-wide base theme for all new projects. The themes we're looking into are:
http://drupal.org/project/base
http://drupal.org/project/cleanstate
http://drupal.org/project/hunchbaque
http://drupal.org/project/sympal_theme
http://drupal.org/project/zen_basic

Any opinions on these? Any other must-haves in your starter theme?

One of the other things we do is to include START and END comments in each tpl file so that you can easily trace your templates on the site by viewing source with this snippet:

A bunch of us themers at DrupalCon Barcelona decided that we really ought to revive this group!

On that note... Merlin gave a great presentation on the exciting new things happening in themes for Drupal 6, including subthemes, info files, MUCH better separation of logic and presentation, and more template files throughout Drupal. Here's a more thorough description of what's changed for theming in 6: http://drupal.org/node/132442

We're getting a lot closer to that point where CSS/HTML gurus don't have to be PHP whizzes in order to create great themes.

A heads up on theme development for Drupal 6.

Thanks to the new theme registry by merlinofchaos, there's a nice side effect of being able to intercept theme functions from devel.

What this provides is the ability to list all themable functions used in a page making it a lot more understandable. There is working code but it still needs work. If anyone has ideas on presenting this information please post it. For now it just dumps it into a table but we can get pretty fancy with this, especially with jQuery.

Here's the issue queue:

My name is Olivier Bellin, and I live in Paris.

I'm an IT technology journalist and former chief editor of Computer Reseller News magazine in France (edited formerly by VNU, which created SVM and SVM Mac sites in Drupal already).

I'm planning on creating myself an IT BtoB news portal using a powerful CMS. After considering Joomla for a while, I found that Drupal is probably the best choice. I've now spent a few weeks on learning how Drupal works a bit better (I'm an user and not a programmer).

You want to adjust what type of content is displayed when the user has a small screen size. Whether it's 1600x1400, 640x480, or a mobile device, you want to change what content is displayed to make the most important content more visible. Switchy McLayout does this in a very neat way. It changes what's displayed to the user dynamically, no matter what screen size their using. Go ahead, try it out!

I've packaged and uploaded the three themes we discussed at recent meetings (Nirvana, Nirvana Skeleton, and Barebones): files.fourkitchens.com/drupal.

IMPORTANT: These are unofficial, marginally untested, alpha releases! Official versions of the themes will be uploaded to Drupal's CVS when we're completely happy with them. Your mileage may vary!

Hey everyone. I have agreed to give a Theming Demo at the next Twin Cities Drupal User Group. The problem is that I do not own a laptop. So if someone could possibly help me out here, that would be great. Preferably I would like:

Laptop with a local webserver and a fresh install of Drupal. A simple, but good text editor, and Firefox.

OR I can set up my own fresh install of Drupal and use someone's laptop for the demo. I would need a good ftp client, good text editor, and Firefox.

Any takers? Thanks ahead of time.

UPDATE:
While the following post was primarily geared to the Los Angeles Drupal group, it (should) have some relevance to 'some' folks in whatever group you're reading this in. This is an ongoing 'drupal' project and the more folks that can get actively involved would be a very good thing....

Themers! Where are you? Let's get together. There's lots of work to be had, and we can throw some your way. I'm tired of turning away clients (due to workload) without referring them to designers I know and trust. I want to meet you and give you work!

My apologies for the job-ish posting -- I know it's not the ideal forum. I tried posting in Paid Drupal services a week ago, but as the comments reveal, many of the replies were from overseas companies whose websites are rife with design and spelling errors.