I just "ported" (for some values of ported) my old theme to Omega on http://webchick.net/. Thanks! :D

However, I found it pretty strange that something like the "Add new comment" and "Read more" links had such intricate styling done to them, but yet some really super basic things did not. For example:

- "new" indicators on comments are just the word "new" italicized. No colouring, bolding, or some other means of quickly identifying them, when they're quite important to following a conversation.

- There's no styling at all for code and

pre

. They just look like normal text. That's a regression from just straight-up HTML which will handle that for me.

- No visual difference between a visited link and an unvisited link. Another regression from straight-up HTML.

- "Tags" are just a regular a vertical list w/out bullets, rather than a horizontal list as one would expect for something where you're encouraged to enter many values.

So this is all stuff me as a novice CSS person has to figure out how to do myself. It would've been nice if the theme just took care of stuff like that for me, with a nice default presentation that I could tweak/override if I wanted.

And I could accept the argument that that's not the point of a starter theme, and that a starter theme should be as hands-off as possible, but then that doesn't really reconcile with the "buttony" links on nodes and comments, and the pager. IMO the theme should either be opinionated everywhere about what looks good, or get out of the way so I know to do everything from scratch.

Comments

Cellar Door’s picture

Hey Webchick! I'm working on a very simplistic subtheme right now to work as a starter theme and have it mostly done but not entirely. This is great to know as I want to polish through many of the little details to make it bare bones but still have some styling to the various points. I'll incorporate your thoughts here in it and if you have anymore let me know.

I'll make it a library so that it can be enabled/disabled, many of the core stylings are able to be disabled right now so if I'm following you right you'd recommend having the "base" omega have none of these enabled (work as default as possible) and the starter theme have them enabled in order to relieve some of the pain of the little details. Great input!