8.x-5.x Roadmap [#2418039]

With the beta6 release of Drupal 8 I have revisited the changes after quite a lengthy period of codebase changes.

At this point, given it's trajectory, I would expect a D8 release in summer... bearing that in mind, it's probably fruitful to drop 8.x-4.x and 1.x (not even sure what 1.x is or was). Given that 8 is new, I doubt many would miss F4. There are boilerplate Twig templates already in there, which I think were based on F5 from 7.x and converted to Twig.

That said, this gives a rare opportunity to change the way the theme works for D8.

Things that I think should remain:

SCSS folder structure
Grunt for development tasks
Bower for keeping up to speed with the official Zurb repository for Foundation

Things needing addition:

Panels twig templates
Views default twig templates

Things needing review:

Simplifying subtheme creation & management
Cutting dependence on Foundation theme to tightly support theme plugins
Respond.js support - necessary?
Theme settings review

From here, it gets somewhat dicey, as a lot of the theme functions we've known and used since Drupal 5 are basically gone, deprecated, or now part of the OO library in D8.

For instance, linking an image, say, the logo, used to be as simple as:

l('<img src="logo.jpg"/>', '<front>');

In Drupal 8, from the best I can tell in other examples and the docs that currently exist, that is now something like:

\Drupal::l($variables['logo_img'], \Drupal\Core\Url::fromRoute('<front>'));

Not a huge deal, but there seems to be a total removal of theme() function too, so calls to theme('image', array()) also no longer work. There are counterparts to accomplish it in D8, but I have not got that far yet. Other functions like drupal_add_js/css, menu_get_item, etc have all been removed.

That said, template.theme could probably stand a review and cleanup. Do we need all of the things it once provided by default, or can we gut it down to the minimum and leave it up to implementors to provide their own conveniences and decorators? I am of the opinion that we should make it as simple as possible, which would make this theme more of a Zen-level powerhouse of theming.

Also, perhaps we could make the theme development faster by putting the onus of plugin support on the surrounding support modules. It seems like Zurb is dropping support for its plugins as time passes (like Orbit) which makes me wonder how much of that is even worth fretting over. This would allow Foundation base to be a total grid supported system out of the box while other contrib space can work at supporting Foundation plugins a far deal better, and/or using their own plugins to solve different use cases (modals, slideshows etc) without the theme getting in the way of that, assuming they are or will use Foundation internals.

Comment	File	Size	Author
#19	Selection_041.png	23.52 KB	joshtaylor

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Comment #1

kevinquillen CreditAttribution: kevinquillen commented 1 February 2015 at 06:44

Issue summary:

View changes

Comment #2

chrisjlee CreditAttribution: chrisjlee commented 2 February 2015 at 17:29

Kevin, sounds great. Thanks for the update.

Next steps? We should start creating issues for individual tasks then?

Comment #3

kevinquillen CreditAttribution: kevinquillen commented 3 February 2015 at 04:48

I am going to look at D8 again and wrap my head around it, issues will probably come out of that.

This time around, should we be more diligent in defining every theme override needed to control HTML output to be as close as possible to Foundation? Meaning, all form elements, item lists, drop buttons... I'm not sure we ever did that, but it might be a good starting point.

I need to get a better understanding of how the theming engine has changed as well. Some of the old functions that were clutch are gone, which kind of breaks half of template.php as it is now.

8.x-5.x Roadmap

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