Theme a view 6.x without Wizard

I don't think there are any particular merits, besides organisation. I imagine there is a slight performance gain to be had in NOT including a bunch of tpl files, but I'm only guessing and caching would probably negate any real gains on that front anyway. Generally speaking most people should use the tpl files, but this is a useful trick for *developers* to be aware of. =)

Btw, there seem to be some mistakes in that article - some hooks have either changed or were incorrectly documented. To get a list of available hooks you should browse to modules/views/theme/theme.inc (or wherever your modules are) and output the $themes variable in the _views_theme_functions() function at the start of that file - here's an example with the Devel module installed:

function _views_theme_functions($hook, $view, $display = NULL) {
  $themes = array();

  if ($display) {
    $themes[] = $hook . '__' . $view->name . '__' . $display->id;
    $themes[] = $hook . '__' . $display->id;
    if ($display->id != $display->display_plugin) {
      $themes[] = $hook . '__' . $view->name . '__' . $display->display_plugin;
      $themes[] = $hook . '__' . $display->display_plugin;
    }
  }
  $themes[] = $hook . '__' . $view->name;
  $themes[] = $hook;

  //what are the available hooks?
  dsm($themes);
  return $themes;
}

Sub for this if you don't have Devel:

  //what are the available hooks?
  print_r($themes);

AFAIK, then you'll get the actual list of hooks the Views module is expecting to look for. Prepend them with themename_ to use them in template.php.

--
http://www.drupaler.co.uk/