Moderator: Adrian Rossouw

A common problem among people who have just started using Drupal is that creating a new theme is too hard.

A large part of this is due to the flexibility of the themeing system, but unfortunately a lot of this complexity is not completely explained and well managed to the end user.

This session will be about better organising the themeing system, to more easily allow for sites that don't all look like Drupal sites.

A part of this will be about introducing a flexible 'Layout' layer into drupal core, that allows for different site / section layouts to be more easily configured, using the powerful regions support that has recently been added to core.

This will also allow us to ship with a seperate (configurable) admin layout, which will in turn drastically reduce the amount of work required to create a distributable theme. The goal is to simplify the theme configuration interface to allow it to be more easily understood.

Another goal will be to better integrate with phptemplate now in core, as a lot of the other theme engines are based on phptemplate, and we can also stand to simplify phptemplate itself to allow for better performance. Introduction of meta-data alone will greatly enhance the themeing experience.

Additionally the implications of the forms api, especially the changes in 4.8, need to be discussed. As they will allow for more flexible templating, more specifically allowing for automatic template loading and a much simpler implementation of a fully integrated template editor.

Lastly, we should discuss style guidelines and possibly start compiling a proper styling guide for module and theme developers, to allow for more themeing to be done on a purely css level.