Theme development

[Editor's note: In the 8 years since this was written, all but a few of the links have rotted. To preserve the original sense of what is/isn't meant to be linked, these dead links have been changed to "example.com" rather than completely removed.]

I am in the process of designing a new approach to the themeing system currently employed by Drupal. But first I feel I might need to explain a bit about the approach I am leaning towards. If you are interested in Drupal themeing, I would greatly appreciate if you read the entire post, as I would like as much input about what I am planning, as to better try to help Drupal designers. This is a rather in depth post, but contains some insights into the new system I am currently developing.

I feel that most of what we consider a 'Drupal theme' at this stage, is too complex, and too rigid a framework for most web designers attempting to work with our platform. I propose we rethink the theme system as it currently stands to be a more generic templating system. Specifically , most of cruft in themes can be attributed to completely separate configuration settings and capabilities for each. This leaves us with a set of themes which are incompatible and different from each other, and if a designer wants a feature only another theme supports .. he is left with the choice of porting the feature to his current theme (not that easy for non programmers), or rebuilding his work on the new theme. The designer might even be faced with judgment calls regarding which set of features he would rather have.