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Many of our users don’t realize that we offer a number of site themes for ExpressionEngine 1.x, but for the most part, you do, and none of these themes appeal to you because you either do a lot of client work with ExpressionEngine, or use it to maintain your own fully branded internet property.  These themes lend themselves more to blogging, really, and again, most of you are designer superheroes and would never use a stock theme anyway.  But if you had your own base set of templates and tools that you liked starting with, you could create your own themes, and it’s as easy as:

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No, there’s not much correlation here to MVC programming.  Think much simpler, these files are used to create the templates; there’s no PHP here, no need to set up controllers to call them.  If you were to choose the theme shown in this blog entry as the theme to install with EE you would end up with the exact same templates in your template manager that you do now on an EE 1.x default installation.

WOW!!!

Looks and sounds absolutely amazing!!! Can’t wait until that is upon us!

I always like to start with at least a base CSS file and a few javascript dependencies in each project. At the moment I simply have an install that I made with everything in the way I like it and then I just upload that file for file and then insert the SQL so that it comes out the same every time but this way of doing things will be absolutely fantastic!!

Brilliant news!

On a related note to this will there also be a way to do this around the other way? That is if you have set up templates using the admin panel and have everything the way you like it, will you then be able to somehow save this out as files to make a new theme?

I appreciate that the way you have shown it means that it probably wouldn’t take very long to do it via copy-paste but just thinking if it was a fairly large / complex site then you could do it by hand but it would be really nice if there was a way to export what you had done in the admin panel to a theme file or something.

Thanks for the info though, much appreciated. I’m sure loads of people are going to have questions on this one now 😉

Best wishes,

Mark

That sounds great! Looking forward to 2.0 even more. I’m impatient so it’s killing me btw!

Does this mean EE2 is ditching its database-backed template engine and going to a file-based system completely (ala Wordpress), or will these files be “imported” into the database as the end of their life-cycle?

Imported - controlling content via the database is too powerful and convenient, allowing you to make changes from any web-enabled appliance.  To reiterate, this is not a change to how EE’s template manager nor parsing engine works, but in how you can load (and share) pre-generated templates from external sources, i.e. how template “themes” are defined.

How about an Import templates feature?

How about an Import templates feature?

This change will allow these types of things that would have been somewhat difficult before.  Importing, or as Mark mentioned, exporting, are certainly possibilities thanks to this new straightforward format.  It will also be friendlier for text editing apps that have a hard time using a syntax highlighting language that doesn’t match the filename’s extension.

Thanks for the update Derek, it’s practically a site map approach to templating that should make a bit more sense, for newbies to hit the ground running. How ‘bout a template throwdown (random google fun but outdated site). It sounds like something that would work great for me.

How about an Import templates feature?

This change will allow these types of things that would have been somewhat difficult before.  Importing, or as Mark mentioned, exporting, are certainly possibilities thanks to this new straightforward format.  It will also be friendlier for text editing apps that have a hard time using a syntax highlighting language that doesn’t match the filename’s extension.

Thanks Derek for reassurance…this is going to speed up development by quite a bit.
Thank you for the news!

Derek - I couldn’t quite work it out from what you said above…will templates (by default anyway) still have to be created within the CP, even if you’re going to be working with them as files? 

At the least, are templates you create in the CP going to be automatically turned into files (no checkboxes required)?

At the least, are templates you create in the CP going to be automatically turned into files (no checkboxes required)?

I should hope not…—OK, let’s make it a global configuration option 😊

Did I miss something?

Did I miss something?

No, I think Ingmar is just referring to the fact that everyone rolls EE their own way. One person’s default is another’s headache. Ah, the joys of app development. 😊

What Jones is referring to specifically applies to how EE will read a theme at installation. There, of course, more to discuss on the matter but not yet.

Hm, don’t think so. I just wouldn’t want “templates you create in the CP going to be automatically turned into files” without being given the choice, since I for one am not using file-based templates. I might have simply misunderstood you.

ETA: What Leslie says.