not saving changes to theme (via sub theme methys)

Hey zilla,

can you check your drupal log file, server log files? Looks like your hosting/php is not configured properly.
Did you check whether the folder is configured to be readable/writeable?

There are several issues similar to you observation, please check e.g. http://drupal.org/node/1610228 or http://drupal.org/node/324085#comment-1131839.

Please confirm whether it is a configuration issue so we can narrow down the problem.

For your methys project question, currently we offer all of our themes for free. However this won't be the case for all our themes. The four themes ̣TB Blog, TB Purity, TB Sirate and TB Simply will stay free forever. That's why we don't put all of our themes to drupal.

Hi wanted to post a blog post but thought it would be better to post my looooooooong answer here ;)

The Problem
Users aren’t able to save themes settings which have a high number of blocks

The Story
2 months ago a user (zilla) send me an email report and shared with me that he is not able to save the theme’s setting. Wow, we were surprised as this is the first case. So I exchange several messages with him to narrow down the root cause. At the end zilla passed us his acquia server information and we tested directly on the development server. We wish we would have access to an acquia server to test our Drupal themes ;)

The Case
Bang, we saw that he installed the free version of TB Methys with ~ 130 blocks!!! We did not considered that any website would have such a high number of blocks. So we went through this issue and finally concluded “hey Drupal is pretty in use for high volume content in the publishing/news industry we need to find a solution and improve this!”

Our base theme core developer had a look into this and has done some testing to figure out the core reason.

The core reason
With PHP 5.3.9. comes the max_input_vars which at default is set to 1000. What means in your GET and POST requests the server accepts max. 1000 of variables. What also means you are allowed to have a max. of 1000 fields in a form only.

In the latest version, Nucleus was limited to 100 blocks as the result of the max_input_vars value. Each block has about 8-10 fields (checkbox, select box) (take it times 100 and you reach the max. no. of variables quick) including hidden fields. When you tried to save the theme settings, every value which does not fit into the max 1000 vars just won’t be submitted.

The Solution
We killed all recurring fields for each block. And have now only 1 form. But we weren’t able yet to kill the hidden fields for each block. Those hidden fields are required to associate blocks with region, the weight (order of a block in a region), style and extended class. Right now we don’t touch the hidden fields as this change would have impact to all the other sub-themes.

We tuned up Nucleus to support up to 200 blocks at the moment.

We are at final testing steps and will release it within next 2 weeks.

Conclusion
If you develop a base theme or anything with PHP and Drupal. Make sure that you set max_input_vars properly in your php.ini file.
You can reach pretty easy and fast to the default limit of 1000 vars. So test and check it again and again.
Our team needs to do better!

I hope with our sharings you got some insights about of our biggest issue we had in the last month before we finally release a stable version of Nucleus.

Today we have released the stable version within this version we have improved this issue.