Hi,

I just watch the Scott video series about Omega 4.
He shows how to create multiple custom layouts and how to easily pick a different layout for different variants using Panels Everywhere.

However, I find the process of creating multiple layouts a bit more complicated than having one main complex and flexible layout that would work for the whole website.

Here's a comment I posted on his last video. I would like to hear your thoughts on that too if possible.

Thanks!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp70_OzYtY0&list=PLLnpHn493BHH5nnK2dKE_4...

...

Even after watching your videos, I think I would still prefer to only create one complex layout with all the regions that I would need for the whole website. And add some logic inside page.tpl.php in order to add a few classes so that the layout can smoothly adapt itself when some regions are empty.

I don't see the point of creating separated layouts when you can have only one layout that will work for all your site.

From what I understand, the only advantage would be a gain in performance because it allows to load ONLY regions that are needed.

But this comes with a price: it seems the maintenance of the theme is more complicated...
Everytime you create a new layout:
- you have to create a bunch of files or copy and rename correctly including the no-query file
- you have to not forget to call css files inside the .info file with a specific syntax
- you have to think about adding all the @imports you need in your project to all scss files of the layout
- because you copy those imports it means everytime you're gonna need to add a new @import in styles.scss, well you will need to also add it to all your layouts... well this can probably be solved by creating a special _imports.scss with all @imports...
- you actually are creating three new separate css files that will be added to the page load... ok you can enabled CSS aggregation in Drupal but then what's the point in aggregating all your theme scss files into one styles.css file if you create separate files for layouts.

So I might not have all the best arguments, but is creating multiple layouts really worth it?

Are there reasons I don't see why one would want to create multiple layouts instead of one complex and flexible one that does it all?

Comments

Nicolas Bouteille’s picture

Title: Why what I prefer to create multiple layouts instead of one complex flexible one? » Why would I prefer to create multiple layouts instead of one complex flexible one?