By J.C. Roberts on

Well I'm starting out with drupal and plan to build a theme. The big question is should I create my theme for stable (4.3.2) or use current CVS (4.4.x)? From the comments I've seen around the board, it looks like major changes to the theme system are in CVS and any work I do on a theme in 4.3.x will have to be redone when 4.4.x is released.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks,
JCR

Comments

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

The changes are mostly in syntax, except for one: in 4.4.x/CVS, all themes must return their data while in 4.3.x they should print it. If you write your theme so that for each method, you first put all your data in a variable, and then print it at the end, you can convert to 4.4.x easily later by just replacing 'print' with 'return'.
The general theme system remains the same though so you won't have to start from scratch.

J.C. Roberts’s picture

J.C. Roberts commented

Thank You!

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

The changes to the theme system are described at Converting 4.3 themes to CVS. The theme system in the HEAD branch is more consistent, documented better and easier to work with. If you want to help improve Drupal's themeability, you'll want to submit patches diffed against HEAD.

We are happily using Drupal HEAD here on drupal.org but whether you should, is something you have to decide: Drupal HEAD is tested to a lesser extend and at times, it can be a bit daunting to track changes.

J.C. Roberts’s picture

J.C. Roberts commented

Thanks Dries,

I've made it through 65% of the docs and I'm working my way through the 4.3.2 source. In a week or so, I should be in a postion to submit patches. Though usability is a known issue, your code is clean, well organized and contains very impressive functionality.

The site I'm building is to serve Leukeima patients and their families as well as be the home for the non-profit organization we started to help with the financial burden of treatment. The site must be simple enough for a person to use when they are going through chemotherapy and doped up on morphine (i.e. patient bolgs) and the site must be stable (no breakage, drupal or me :-).

If the release date for 4.4.x is not too far off (the next month or two), I should probably start with CVS rather than 4.3.x because the only place it's running will be on my test box until the new site is finished. It will take me awhile to port the existing site code into a theme of some sort.

I'll give the idea of running HEAD on the production machine some thought when I get more familiar with things. My provider is running OpenBSD on the web server (upnix.com) with PHP most likely in safe mode. If HEAD remains reasonably stable, testing it in somewhat uncommon production environment (obsd) could be a good thing for drupal. It's against my nature to run HEAD in a production environment but I'll at least give it some more consideration.

I noticed that FreeBSD recently added drupal to their ports collection -part of their push to get FreeBSD over 10K ports mark by the end of 2003. In the past I've contributed various kde ports to openbsd and building a drupal port for obsd seems rather simple at first glance.

Most of all, thank you for the effort you and the others have put into drupal. The effort shows. ;-)

JCR

Dries’s picture

Dries commented

Though usability is a known issue, your code is clean, well organized and contains very impressive functionality.

We have put a fair amount of work into improving Drupal's usability but we need more input. New users like you do a better job identifying usability issues so please - while you are still new to Drupal - take notes of what confused you or what you think can be made more user-friendly. Share your notes with us so we can (help) translate these into code. When you do, consider using Drupal HEAD.

J.C. Roberts’s picture

J.C. Roberts commented

When I saw you post yesterday, I stopped reading source and started concentrating my efforts on writing "new user" observations on usability. With any luck, I'll get them finished by mid next week. The notes will be long and detailed; current word count is at 1694 and I'm just getting warmed up.

JCR