Clean up Seven theme's maintenance page for use as db-offline default

Again, Seven is not for public-facing eyes.

Where and when was it decided it was not for public facing eyes. This gives us an opportunity to not burn out the eyes of our viewers yet again with garland and removes the "sevenish" look from seven.

@sun, I wouldn't say that showing Seven's maintenance page really means you're seeing "Seven", per se. It's just two generic pieces of text with a generic gray bar across the top.

So I'm in favor of sticking with Seven. However, like somebody mentioned in the other issue, it might be good to just get rid of the gray bar across the top on the maintenance page and make it all white.

johnvsc said (on the previous issue):

defaulting to garland or a blue (and now, branded and well known) interface creates a panic ... esp for clients who don't know anything about their system...

That is true. This is why I think it's a user experience issue. I work with a lot of clients, and build sites for them. They are the ones taking care of the site — adding content, moderating comments, etc. They sort of know Drupal, but not really. It's bad enough when their site goes down, but for it to get rethemed with Garland just makes the situation that much worse. Of course, people with high level Drupal skills can set-up their sites to prevent this emergency, but most people don't know how to do that — or frequently there's just not enough budget to worry about details like this.

I don't understand why Garland is considered a better solution for this case. I'm only hearing two cases for using Garland: the "that's the way we've always done it" argument; and the "Seven isn't supposed to be used for this" argument. Both of which are Drupal-insider theoretical issues. Neither of which makes a case for better user experience.

Pretending for a moment that we have no idea what's going on from Drupal's perspective, what would make for the best experience of people who:
1) own/run a site (when someone else built and upgrades it); and
2) people who go to the site to use it
when the site is being upgraded, or the database server goes down and the site breaks.

The only acceptable way to change this is to change the code in a way that the $conf['maintenance_theme'] setting is also used when the DB is down.

Then, you can do whatever you want to do, and people who care about proper design + themes can use a proper theme for the maintenance page under all circumstances.

When a site is in maintenance we want to show a branded page. Let's say that Sony makes the site down for a few minutes, the maintenance page should be Sony branded.

If the maintenance page is not branded, users may panic if we display Seven or Minelli or Garland. But if the maintenance page is branded, they won't panic.

By default we must not use Seven for the maintenance page because we cannot brand it. We need a regular theme. In Drupal 7 this defaults to Minelli, but a site admin can default it to any theme in which he added the proper maintenance.tpl php file.

If we want to use Seven, we would need to modify it to make it usable as a regular theme in which we could inject the site logo, etc.

So to stay in this issue main subject, let's clean up Seven code to make it brandable.

Subscribing. I think the points about defaulting to something neutral vs. defaulting to something bright fricking blue are spot-on. If your server is *really* broken, you get an Apache error, after all, which has absolutely zero styling.

Interested to see what you folks come up with.

Though one thing, AFAIK from D6+ it's possible to theme the maintenance page even now. I know our clients' servers don't show Minelli when taken down for maintenance. I'm not sure if this is true of SQL errors and the like tho. Needs investigating.

Re: #10 and #7, changing the maintenance_theme in settings.php works for both maintenance mode and for DB errors (in D6 at least).

If we just want a white page with some slightly styled text, could we not use stark with a bit of font styling added in? Or a 'stark maintenance' subtheme?

Yeah, in thinking about it I wonder if Stark isn't the best option here after all? Better no branding than totally different branding? Or am I on crack? :)

Stark would be a good idea. But stark does not have any "tpl" file. Stark is a CSS-only starting theme for those who do not want to mess around PHP code.

Do we want to add a maintenance.tpl.php file there? I guess not! :-)

Well. Good point. ;)

Well. Could system module provide one, and Stark just default to that, as it does all the other *.tpl.php files?

So, the title of this issue is noncontroversial - cleaning up the Seven theme's maintenance page definitely makes sense, especially since so many of you seem to want to use it for that :)

But using Seven by default still doesn't make much sense to me - especially if we don't get #421062: Maintenance theme is ugly and cannot be altered in, but really even if we do. Again, as stated at the other issue, the argument for continuing to use Garland/Minnelli is pretty simple: Drupal needs to make sense out of the box. Most people would like their maintenance page to look like their site theme. Drupal's default site theme is Garland, so its default maintenance theme should be also. Having it be something else would be equivalent to shipping Drupal broken out of the box.

The arguments above for using Seven all seem to be related to "clients" and "branding" and such, but I don't understand why the default behavior should be designed for that use case? Sites who are in the category of being really worried about that kind of thing are spending plenty of money on their website - they should be able to afford to hire a developer who can spend the extra 30 seconds to put one line of code in settings.php :) For smaller community sites and such, though, I would think they'd be much happier to see a nicely themed page pop up when their site is offline, rather than stark black text on a white background. I know I thought it was pretty neat the first time I saw Drupal do that... and in the event that the site is using Garland (which many, many sites do), the fact that Drupal automatically themes their site correctly even when they have no database connection is especially nice. Who are we really helping by taking away that behavior?

Well written comment that tells everything. Thanks David.

Most users, specially the new ones will stick to Garland while learning Drupal. And visitors would see the site in Garland as well, even if the color module have been used to some extent.

Let's close this issue then. :-)

Thank you.

But it seems reasonable to keep this open for now, because (a) not everyone seems to agree with that yet, and (b) it's certainly possible to improve the Seven theme's maintenance page (as per the issue title) without actually switching Drupal to use it by default... and there's no problem at all with doing that :)

I, for one, would be completely fine with just making Seven the default for this with no other changes. It looks generic enough as it is. It was suggested to remove the gray bar across the top so that it's all white, but IMO there's not much use in doing that.

The default order for the discovery of the maintenance.tpl.php file should be:

1. System.module/maintenance.tpl.php
2. Theme defined in settings.php
3. NEW settings to be created in the themes pages to select the maintenance theme.

Again Seven should not be used here. :-)

Again, we should only be talking about what to do when the db is offline AND the maintenance theme is not defined in settings.php.

What is your suggestion? Right now when there is no setting set in settings.php for the maintenance page (we need to uncomment the line), it uses nevertheless Minelli.

- Creating a new error.tpl.php file?
- Do you think that admins will want to theme the error page?

When database is down AND no settings.php maintenance theme is configured, the options are:

1. Statu quo (leave things as they are, using Minelly maintenance template).
2. Create a new blank error page to replace the Minelly (display only text with minimal styling).
3. Create a new themed error page which replaces Minelly (text and visual elements).
4. We could use the layout of Drupal 5 error page (druplicon with text).

Are you looking for some visual concepts?

looks like the uhhh-wtf-issue from #63 in #547068: D7UX: use Seven for installation / updates got re-introduced somehow

got this in a fresh checkout today

it seems to have been caused by #639354: Spacing between horizontal radio buttons too crampy but I wouldn't say that "broke" it, it was already broken and that just showed it

making body.in-maintenance #content float (left or right, doesn't rly matter, but I'd say left makes more sense) fixes it without causing any repercussion as far as I can tell

also posting this in #421062: Maintenance theme is ugly and cannot be altered

oh, looks like #641810: "Select installation profile" page looks weird with custom profiles tries to do exactly that

replacing all error, maintenance and whatever pages with seven makes sense.
To make it not look so very blank good old druplicon could help out :)

Even with another theme as admin theme this should not be a harsh jump as seven succeeds in looking rather neutral. (almost blank, actually :P)

Using Seven would be a nice improvement. We install and update with Seven, so maintenance makes a lot more sense with Seven than Garland.

Jacine, but the "users" only will see garland ;).

Since Bartik is now the default theme, I wonder if we can close this issue?

Bartik's maintenance page looks like http://drupal.org/files/bartik.png which (ignoring the big red error message of course) seems like it meets all the goals that various people had in this issue. In particular, it matches Drupal's default theme styling, but it's not in-your-face and heavily branded either.

We could actually leave the issue open since "clean up Seven theme's maintenance page" is still valid either way (and there are definitely some issues with it - I had a patch somewhere that fixed a few of them), but maybe it would be simpler to just start a new issue for that.

In light of #1181776: Change theme_default variable to Stark, I'd actually suggest to re-purpose this issue to target Stark instead of Seven, which essentially is what @catch already proposed in #12 two years ago.