Provide a starterkit theme in core

I took a quick look at this, and it's wonderful!

I would love to see a sample JavaScript file included with some Drupal behaviors (including some documentation on what Drupal behaviors are).

Thoughts?

Amazing work!!!

It would be amazing to have some example Drupal behaviors.

I've reviewed the MR. Looks like a fantastic start! (wink) - I've left some comments on the code

• We need to add test coverage. It might be good to use a build test here as we can test running the command without an installed Drupal. And then we can do the install and enable the new theme.
• I asked @lauriii about why we where adding the starterkit theme. It turns out this theme is a copy of classy and will allow us to remove classy in D10. This means we need to duplicate classy's tests and to ensure that it is tested when we do generic theme testing. One problem is that this conflicts a bit with using the hidden property. Also I think we need a follow-up to replace protected $defaultTheme = 'classy'; with starterkit. We also need to add it to lists like the one found in \Drupal\Tests\block\Functional\BlockDemoTest::testBlockDemo and potentially we should consider adding a trait to list themes to test. We might want to do that in a blocking issue.
• There are a lot of tests using classy - there's #3083275: [meta] Update tests that rely on Classy to not rely on it anymore - would it be the worst solution to change them to use starterkit?

Since lauriii asked for thoughts on the starterkit theme idea in a core blog post, I just wanted to add my hearty +1 to this initiative, as a Drupal themer from 4.6 days forward.

And from the issue summary, my opinion on this remaining task:

Should we add a way to recognize themes generated using starterkit (potentially useful for statistics and other purposes)?

is yes. Even if it's something like a meta tag or HTML comment that could be removed, in the same way you can remove mentions of Drupal itself in site code. I think being able to both a) show success/adoption of a core initiative in the future and b) help guide where to go next, can only be helped by having this kind of information.

@lauriii +1 to removing classy and documenting the list better in \Drupal\Tests\block\Functional\BlockDemoTest::testBlockDemo

Adding demo video from yesterday to issue summary.

Make it even more obvious that it is clickable.

I love this!!

Given that we have an abundance of starterkit-style themes in contrib, I do think it would be useful to provide a way of specifying another source starterkit theme in the cmd. Then, we will hopefully see those other starter kit themes adopt a consistent pattern for theme creation.

I guess the script would need a way to detect if a specified theme is indeed "compatible" with being used as a starterkit. Maybe something in the .info.yml?

+1 for being able to specify another source in the command this would open very interesting possibilities. There could be different starter kit source themes in contrib for using different front-end tools (sass, postcss, gulp, webpack).

I love to have one/more theme starter kits in core!...
To theme a Drupal site is still not so easy yet. Theme starter kits in core may help us be more productive - different best practices....

As Drupal is based on Symfony and Twig what do you think about Webpack Encore.... a starter kit theme based on Symfony solution...

The command currently only allows using a starterkit theme as the source theme, but it could be easily modified to support other themes such as Olivero.

This would be awesome, let us know how we can help with that.

Very excited about this feature in general, and also wanted to +1 the idea of specifying a different starter kit source. Many contrib themes have a command to generate a new theme, and they approach it in slightly different ways. Using this to encourage a standard would be great.

I'd like to recommend Drush support for the automatic deployment of the theme.

For the record, as a Drupal core product manager, I discussed product requirements with @lauriii on February 16, and reviewed a demo of the tool then. I think that some solution for tracking changes to the source theme after the copy was made would be needed for beta, but that is not necessarily a solution within the tool itself. It could be a release process addendum. Either way, I expect people will come up with that requirement in the testing process and make suggestions. I am not attached to a specific solution but IMHO some kind of solution would be needed. Since this may require changes to the tool itself, I think it is not possible to make the tool beta without knowing how this would work. (I think you need some way to tell which version of the source theme you used to generate your copy and the tool may need to copy that info over from your source).

As a Drupal core product manager, I think the current functionality is sufficient for alpha inclusion in core. (I did not do a code review though and will not do one).

Would generating a sub-theme based on for example Olivero be in scope here? I imagine that could become a very popular tool, like what https://github.com/acquia-pso/cog_tools does, which can be used for inspiration.

@ressa see @lauriii's comment #29 and #3206219: Allow configuring which theme is used as a starterkit theme

Thanks @alexpott, but if I understand this issue and #3206219: Allow configuring which theme is used as a starterkit theme correctly, the method is to copy all the code of a base theme (or another theme, like Olivero) to form a complete theme, and in effect detach this newly created theme.

From the Issue Summary:

The key change will be that in the process of creating a new theme based on starterkit, all templates are copied to the new theme, rather than them being loaded run time from a base theme.

In my thinking, a sub-theme should rely on the base theme for most files, inheriting the parent theme's resources, but allow overrides by copying files from the base theme to the sub-theme, and modifying them. In this way, the parent theme can be updated during the regular updates. Of course, the user needs to make sure that nothing breaks after an update.

If a sub-theme based on Olivero could be created by running a command, it would allow users to quickly go from 0 to 60, by simply updating the logo and color scheme of the new sub-theme, and have a great looking web site.

@ressa that point of starter kits is to decouple from the other theme. That way the starter kit can make changes with the confidence that they are not going break other themes. Base theme introduce a tight coupling that makes change in the base theme impractical because the ramifications of a change are impossible to work out.

@alexpott: I understand the difference between starterkit and sub-theming, but @laurii specifically mentions sub-theming as an option in his answer in the "Drupal 10 theming starterkit demo on March 15, 2021" presentation, using Olivero as base for a sub-theme (question and answer starting at 29:30 min):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkUAjQ5xKT8&t=1770s

That's why I am asking if offering an Olivero sub-theming feature would be out of scope for this issue, or perhaps another issue should be created?

Tagging for DrupalCon North America 2021 contribution.

Successfully tested on a Mac running lando.

Did a review. A couple notes

• Template files are copied over from Classy. I didn't review each template file (there are a lot!)
• There are a lot of components that IMHO we don't need in the starterkit (like forum), but that's another issue
• Command line works as expected (MacOS Big Sur)
• There are both ES6 and ES5 versions of media_embed_ckeditor.theme.js. There is no build process to convert the ES6 to ES5 included.

Since this is going in as alpha, though, this is great and looks amazing. I can't wait for people to start using this as it gets more capabilities!

RTBC!

Adding for (expected) 9.2.0 release highlight.

After agreeing with @lauriii, as part of this issue was to canvas for thoughts on the idea crediting everyone who contributed.

Also crediting Joel and David as contributors to the idea of starterkit themes.

Committed f521770 and pushed to 9.2.x. Thanks!

Awesome! Do we have a documentation plan for this? Feels like it needs to be in the curated guide(s)...

Since this was removed from 9.2.x due to the alpha state, I am moving the tag tentatively to 9.3.0 highlights assuming it will be beta then. Not going to be released in 9.2.x at this point.

I have created #3214072: Provide an Olivero sub-theme creation tool.

Question, can stable(8) extend from stable9, so that we don't have the duplication?

i.e. where there is no difference between stable8 and stable9, it comes from stable9

When I tried, just now, moving a site over to 9.3.0-beta2 and running drupal generate-theme, I got an error that the command did not exist. drupal list | grep theme suggested that I should be using drupal generate:theme instead (alias drupal gt).

The only documentation I've found for a new starterkit theme is the existence of this Drupal Console command in the API Changes section of this issue summary. Does this section need changing to point to the correct Drupal Console command? Or have I misunderstood how to use the proposed starterkit theme?

@JamesOakley That command is part of Drupal core which means it has nothing to do with Drupal Console project.

I also consistently get an error that the command does not exist. I'm on drupal 9.3.5.

Was this removed from 9.2 onward? This issue seems to say so:

https://www.drupal.org/node/3206389

@OMD: we don't include alpha experimental features in releases. They are included in the development versions though as they get to at least beta.