So, I’ve been looking at Scribbish[1] and the CSS Zen Garden[2] and I
like what I see. In particular, I like the idea of the hAtom
microformat for our articles, and I really like the idea of making
sure we have a robust semantic structure for our core HTML. Every time
someone has to write rhtml in their themes I cringe slightly.
So, I’m thinking that the whole Theming thing needs looking at. Here’s
a few ideas:
-
No more overriding layouts/default.rhtml just to add a couple of
theme specific css files. We’ve already moved to having most of
the layout’s header generated by a helper method, it should not be
beyond our wit to have it do something like:<%= render :partial => ‘common/stylesheets.rhtml’ %>
as part of its strategy.
-
Nail down the basic semantic structure of our layout and have more
of the
individual divs rendered as partials (and hence more finely
overrideable by a theme). Also, the ‘partial’ boundary might well
be a good place to insert more granular fragment caching for
better performance. -
Make use of the hAtom microformat (and possibly other microformats
for other bits and pieces, is there one for tag clouds yet?) -
Get some feedback from (or become) CSS experts with an eye to
designing a basic page structure that’s flexible enough that most
themes can simply provide a css file and a bunch of images. Check
out the CSS Zen Garden for the sort of thing that has been
achieved with ‘pure’ CSS. -
As we’re breaking themes already, let’s break 'em good and proper
so we can rebuild them stronger, better, faster…
Thoughts?
