The 2.5.7 release brought the ability to theme anything in the system and, in fact, to rewrite any piece of Typo that the designer desires to. While this may be seen as a strength, and certaintly allows for incredible flexiblity for the designer. The base lacks features that you want? Roll them youself, as controllers are able to be overwritten. There is also a huge danger here, which we have already seen, namely that either development of Typo must cease, or else every new version will, possibly majorly, break existing themes. We have already seen this with the 2.6.0 release which broke themes designed for 2.5.7. Since theme designers cannot be counted upon to be constantly updating their themes, this situation will create a mess of themes that only work with a specific version of typo, which will force users to up or downgrade their installation every time they want to install a new theme, which brings up a whole new set of problems. And if the themer does fix their theme for a new version of typo, it will break it for the old versions.
This situation is untenable. What we need is a theme abstraction layer, the interface to which will stay constant, at least amongst major versions. Such a change would of course require huge changes to the codebase. But if we want typo to continue to grow and flourish with themes, it's a step that much be taken. -- Micah Wylde -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/typo-list/attachments/20051112/a5b2de29/attachment.htm
