I might be going a little far by continuing to call our sustainable method of theming "getting your hands dirty", but it makes me smile. So everyone will have to deal with it for at least 1 or 2 more blog posts.

On that note, I wanted to give the Drupal theming community a couple of examples of approaches we here at Palantir take for implementing a sustainable theme.  I'm going to focus specifically on a very recent method we've implemented at Palantir for theming Views.

What are the things that frustrate me most about theming in Drupal?  The taxonomy view and views, menus, and blocks added by a client post-launch that don't inherit anything from the theme.  In my world that's a FAIL.   Sure, you can't anticipate everything that the site is going to need after it launches, but can't we make it so that the things you think you can modify through the admin at least look good?  And if not all of them, at least 50% of them?

Views tpl files

They are wonderful.  And they're even more wonderful in D6.  I suppose they weren't around in D5, but there was the theming wizard, which sorta was like having templates, just not as useful.  But what do I love even more than the tpl files????  The CSS classes.  Yes I said it, the classes!  All of them! Every last stinking one.  Why?  Because they help you layer in design logic, a very important technique for theming.

In fact, I asked Merlin if I could have more and he said, "No, use the tpl files," and he's right.  I just wanted to avoid adding a tpl file to add a CSS class to the wrapping div, because that's really all I need.

So what we've decided to do at Palantir is to insert a handful of views tpl files into our starter kit theme (which, BTW, is Zen, of course) to help us speed up the process of building a theme for a site.  Our goal is to add a consistent set of CSS classes to the wrapping div and the listed items of the view for all display types and style types -- for every site we build.

First things first: global views styling.

(focusing on just 2 display types: Page & Block)

1. Add 2 tpl files to our sitetheme:
   1. views-view-page.tpl.php
   2. views-view-block.tpl.php
2. Copy the code that views provides for each of these display types in the "theme information" section of that display type, within the Views UI. The code may or may not be different depending on whether or not it's a page, block, rss feed, panel pane, etc.
   1. Example:
      

      [php]
       view-id-<?php print $name; ?> view-display-id-<?php print $display_id; ?> view-dom-id-<?php print $dom_id; ?>">
        <?php if ($admin_links): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $admin_links; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
        <?php if ($header): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $header; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($exposed): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $exposed; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($attachment_before): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $attachment_before; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($rows): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $rows; ?>
          
        <?php elseif ($empty): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $empty; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($pager): ?>
          <?php print $pager; ?>
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($attachment_after): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $attachment_after; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($more): ?>
          <?php print $more; ?>
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($footer): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $footer; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
        <?php if ($feed_icon): ?>
          
      
            <?php print $feed_icon; ?>
          
        <?php endif; ?>
      
       <?php // class view ?>
      <?php endif; ?>
      [/php]

   2. Add a class to the wrapping div that helps globally identify this display type. In the case below we've added "view-page-display".
   3. Example:
      

      [php]
       view-id-<?php print $name; ?> view-display-id-<?php print $display_id; ?> view-dom-id-<?php print $dom_id; ?>">
      [/php]
      
      You'll notice that we added "view-page-display" as a class to the wrapping div.
        
      
      
      
      Second: style tpl files.
      views-view-list.tpl.php or views-view-unformatted.tpl.php
      Put these tpls in your theme and add another global class of "views-row-item" to your item li or div markup.
       Example:
      [php]
      
        <?php if (!empty($title)) : ?>
          
      <?php print $title; ?>
        <?php endif; ?>
        <<?php print $options['type']; ?>>
          <?php foreach ($rows as $id => $row): ?>
            
       clear-block"><?php print $row; ?>
          <?php endforeach; ?>
        >
      
      [/php]
      You can now globally style all view pages, in listed or unformatted format, for example:  a 25px margin bottom and bottom border because you now can declare .view-page-display .views-row-item {}.
      Third: the taxonomy view.  What do we do?  Here are the steps:
      Create a view for taxonomy by cloning the one in core to a new one named taxonomy_term_sitetheme.
      Modify it to use fields instead of the full node display, and  set it to HTML list style b/c that's the way I prefer to semantically layout listed content even when it's blobs 'o text.
      Then  use  previously added classes (view-page-display) to help me theme this taxonomy page view.
      Export the view to code and  include it in the custom.module of the site along with some CSS added to our Zen view-styles.css so that we can use this on other sites.