The heart of the Mothership is markup & CSS cleaning. If you are looking for a theme that makes you site responsive, app like etc. then you need to look at other themes.
There is on the treasure map a mark to build a responsive test theme some time on the horizon- or it will be build into the TEMA-theme. This is still to be decided, and since a responsive theme is more of less pure CSS, it’s not really the Mothership’s role to do this - so dig into you media queries and begin looking for breakpoints.

Concept

The very first idea of the Mothership was to have a theme that removed ALL of Drupals unnecessary markup. There is just one big caveat in that approach: You would need to have a theme that could take into account what every module does today & in the future. That would be completely impossible, a total waste of time, and last but not least not functional in anyway.

Taken that into consideration & the fact that in the last 5 years we went from supporting IE5 & FF3.6 to now more or less skipping IE7 (The codemonkeys on the Mothership have a bet. The odds are for the summer of 2012) we have to be able to experiment with the markup & remove some things when there is no need for it (so your site don’t break because you removed the body.front class on the frontpage etc).

To make it as customizable as possible & make sure that new themers boarding the Mothership are not freaked out - We have a big control room where a new captain can set up his theme as they want to.

The settings are split into 4 groups

Class name modifications:

Here you can remove classes from the markup as you see fit. This is for readability of the markup & making sure that no module suddenly can add funny stuff to an existing class (let’s say .node)

Files javscript & stylesheets control

  • No need to load CSS or js files that you don’t need.
  • Some of the changes in the Mothership adds new markup & classes (icons etc) that requires new CSS. This can be loaded too.
  • Modernizr & Selectivizr are both loadable as CDN.
  • BAT support (of course!)

Theme Development

Handy tools that can help you during development, giving you less headache & gives you some of the essential information for your hot theme making.

Goodies

As we are developing the Mothership, and are taking such a hard look into the core of Drupal’s markup, new ideas & concepts that we want to implement will arise, so instead of hiding them away we are adding them in the goodies (and it sounds better than misc!).