theme concepts

Hello, I'm just posting here to let everyone know that the bulk of the new theming handbook is up. Most of it has been rewritten and reorganized. I hope it is accurate and clear enough to get everyone familiar with the theming system.

It's still missing sections on sub-theming (which can get really fancy BTW). I hope to get a few solid explanations and illustrations on the possibilities. Engineless themes and theme engine sections are not there yet but I don't think it's too critical.

JavaScripting could use some help too. I hope someone can fill that in.

Discuss the Drupal Markup Style Guide

For reference, here is the discussion that has already occurred on that wiki page:

Bevan said:

I reworked this to add my two cents. I incorporated all previous ideas in this -- I think. Let me know if I missed something. - B/

Elv said:

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blockquote>

It's better to have too many classes than not enough

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:

This project started about 4 months ago. At first it was just to contribute a nice little theme but it changed into a source of learning and experimentation on what could be done with Drupals' theming layer.

The code is commented pretty well so I hope others can learn from what's been done. Some of the ideas that went into the theme will eventually end up in the handbook and a site will be dedicated to it also.

... and so on.

We currently have a very fuzzy "tree" that builds our site. I doubt anyone has ever traced the route a string takes from within some Drupal-module 'till its printed.

Some theme functions call other theme functions, whom call other theme functions. Sometimes inbetween you find that Drupal APIs are called.

theme_some_hierarchy() {
  $hierarchy = build_hierarchy()
  foreach ($hierarchy as $subtree) {
    theme('hierarchy_part', $hierarchy, $subtree);
  }
}

Freely crafted after our menu building systems, and just an example.

Recently Dries said he disliked theme functions calling theme functions. This is done all over the place. Maybe we need to look at a solution for this? Something to either get a very consistent page building mechanism (brickslate is an idea to do this after the way JS builds the DOM) . Maybe we need to only create a conceptual guideline. And maybe we need not worry at all and continue trialling-erroring our way to our Perfect Designs.