Dashboard markup and theme functions need work

Here's a start at addressing the underscores issue (#2 and #3), although since currently the dashboard region names are used as IDs, not classes, I did it using drupal_html_id().

The markup for the dashboard regions is indeed not consistent with the way other regions in Drupal are done - e.g., drupal_region_class() and all that - but I'm not sure what the right behavior is here. They are not "really" their own regions, but rather sort of part of the main page content... so what should their markup look like?

For #1, as mentioned on another issue this might be difficult... but from a theming perspective, what is the use case you are thinking about? The reason I'm wondering is that I'm not sure in Drupal 7 themers can ever rely on the main page content appearing within div#block-system-main. For example, if someone is using Panels to manage their page regions rather than the Block module, I wonder what the markup of a regular page will look like then?

For #4 and #5, which theme functions are you referring to? The one I see that might be relevant is http://api.drupal.org/api/function/theme_dashboard_disabled_block/7. I'm not too familiar with that but as far as I know it's only used to display disabled blocks (i.e., the dark gray ones at the top when you click "Customize dashboard"). If so, those are kind of in their own world anyway. I wonder if the problem is more that they are themed too much like regular blocks (e.g., using some of the same IDs and classes) rather than not enough? I would think that in most cases a themer would not want to touch a block in that state at all, at least not in the same way they are theming a block that is actually being displayed...

Even if we left the block theme functions the way they are though, there will still be underscore problems with the classes (for modules with underscores in their name).

As David alluded too in the other issue, there is some overlap between this issue and #936798: Dashboard uses unreliable method for identifying blocks.. That issue (tries to) explain why underscores are required in (some of) the class names. IIRC, underscores are legal characters in CSS class identifiers. Is it a coding guideline to avoid using underscores in classes?

There was a bit of a rant tonight in #drupal-contribute about dashboard module's theme functions and such. :) I'm going to attempt to summarize, just so it's captured somewhere where someone might do something about it. Thanks to Jacine for a pointer to this issue.

- There's a theme_dashboard_region(). But we already have region.tpl.php and theme hook suggestions. Why not use them?
- extract($variables) ? Ick.
- theme_dashboard_disabled_block includes a bunch of hard-coded classes. These should be using the $classes array.
- dashboard_theme() uses block module's form template instead of making one for dashboard so it can be styled separately.
- All of the theme functions in this file have similar problems, and all should be cleaned up.

I'm currently running into these issues in this module's CSS cleanup.

Killed the needless extract() usage.

Whoops, I didn't notice what version the issue was on.
I don't think the CSS is backportable, but some of this will be.

#6: drupal-720544-6.patch queued for re-testing.

Actually, I don't see anything here we could backport to D7. Go go go on cleanup for D8 though. :)

Oh, my mistake. We're just replacing extract($variables) for long-hand $variables['foo']. Hm. That's probably safe.

This is probably better than re-using variables each time. And it's follows the more common pattern I've seen.

Dashboard module is no longer in core, see #950956: Remove Dashboard from core . Moving to 7.x for consideration.