Node based themes
This is almost a philosophical question. I'm in the process of developing a node. I've created a node-page.tpl.php that works largely by riping out most of what was originally there and rebuilding mostly from scratch. The resulting page doesn't even look Drupalish. The change is so complete that I don't really care what the other pages look like. Now it would see to me that it would make more sense to put this template somewhere related to the node code rather than with a specific them. Then the site could change themes without breaking the node. The another approach would appear to be to jam the template into every theme there is which also seems to be a bad idea. A third idea would be to place the relevent style sheets into the node folder and completely build the page there.
I can't imagine this hasn't come up before - every node builder would face the problem of what to do with node specific theme issues - but I can't find any reference to dealing with such problems. While I'm relatively new to drupal, I've spend a lot of time browsing these pages.
Well -- i've got a lot of
Well -- i've got a lot of experience with this issue -- built an entire node base templating system that ended up being quite evil. In the end I found the best way to accomplish this is:
1. Pass the node type to the body tag in page.tpl.php so that CSS can alter the styles by node type.
2. Use drupal_set_content and phptemplate regions to place stuff in headers or sidebars.
3. Use hook_view for content areas that need to change... something usually along these sort of lines:
<?php$node->content['some_widget'] = array('#value' => theme('something', $node));
?>
This may not make a lot of sense -- not sure how deep you have gotten into the subject.
--
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i don't know if this would
i don't know if this would help, but have you seen http://drupal.org/project/node_style
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Wouldnt the smart place to
Wouldnt the smart place to put these templates be in themes/engines/phptemplate?
Surely its a reasonably easy change to phptemplate.engine to tell it to look there for suggestions if no suggestions found in the theme dir - i.e to get the behaviour you want, don't put your node-type.tpl.php in your them dir, but only in phptemplate?
My 2 cents.