Thread

Sorry for contributing to unnecessary FUD then 😊

PS: I have some ideas for add ons but I have been waiting for 2.0 to get diving in, so bring it on!

...another user who, like you, is in the minority of wanting to build a site from a predesigned theme.

49% is still a minority, right? I’ve been working on EE about as long as anyone, since it was beta, and I’ve said it before, this is an area that may well open ExpressionEngine up to a very large community of site developers, as well as create a thriving “theme” community, ala Joomla (not so much WordPress, Drupal, etc., as those themes tend to look pretty much the same).

Handled appropriately, it wouldn’t take much more than EE setting up a “default” setting with a specific page layout—header/logo, front page, content page, left column, right column, footer, archives page, categories page, RSS and CSS, template group name, template names. One click on a button in EE and the ‘default’ setting goes live. All the current customizing features, functions, settings would continue as is. The only other additional ‘click’ would be an option to import a set of standard templates, a ‘theme’, pre-built to the default settings in EE.

The key here is to create a ‘standard’ or a ‘default’ EE setting of configurations, template names, etc., that will always work with ‘themes’ developed to the default. I suspect that a few hundred professional, well-designed ‘themes’ for EE would be an attraction to web developers who don’t know much about EE and don’t want to create a site from scratch with all the EE code, XHTML, and CSS that we deal with normally.

Minority or not, who doesn’t win with such a capability?

A lot of professionals develop a set of “vanilla” templates for certain kinds of sites - these will be adapted to the framework they are using and have a set of options (as variable) to customise them quickly.

Being able to load up these when starting a new project without having to create templates then copy-paste content will be appreciated by them too.

Yes, it is kind of possible to get that now if you have a technical person who set them up as options within EE, but it will be nice when it is built in.

I think there will be “EE templates” sites within minutes of people knowing what the format will be (can we? where do i sign up?), and that the impact in establishing EE as a more “mainstream” platform will be huge