Themes like Paradise, Retro, Shred, WhiteSands...

[SugarDev.net]

..does anyone use them at all?

[julian]

I've seen plenty of people using the 'fringe' themes, but I've always been of the opinion that we could remove some from the base install. It'd be nice to ship with 3-5 themes and leave the rest as Module Loadable packages.

Why do you ask?

[SugarDev.net]

Right now, it seems that the development team has problems with keeping all themes up to date. I've seen numerous bugs that only happen with non-default themes, which are still shipped. It also adds quite some MBs to the installation file.

Personally, I don't ship it to my clients with all themes, they usually never care and find the default theme to be the best. I always ship Sugar+SugarLite.

Simply said: you can improve Sugar's quality by just not supporting these alternative templates.

[julian]

I believe there's an effort underway for Sugar 5.1 to remove more and more logic from the theme files. In my opinion, they should only contain style information and images-- the opportunity for application bugs to surface is removed if that's all the themes contain.

I'm curious myself-- I'll check with the engineering team.

[SugarDev.net]

That's exactly my point julian, the default theme comes with lots of business logic, while others have to come by with much less. If you want to keep the theme system, those steps have to be taken.

[shrydvd]

I actually only like the retro theme. The only reason is that it is easier for me to distinguish between different areas, lines of text, etc. Otherwise, it feels like looking at a spreadsheet all day.
Some of the others are pretty outlandish, but I like retro the best.

[julian]

Hey SugarDev,

It looks like there's some consensus among the engineering team here-- there are plans to reduce/remove the application logic currently found in themes. They would (most likely) contain only CSS and images. I didn't get a timeframe, however-- only "a future release." Stay tuned here-- I'll update this thread if I hear anything else.

[jyim]

We plan to make a lot of changes to Themes in the next major release. We will remove a few themes and make platform changes to make it easier to develop new themes.

I will be posting a poll to find out more about how/if people use the themes, what themes we can let go of, etc. Any additional information will be helpful for us in deciding what changes to make.

Thanks in advance.

[SugarDev.net]

Thnx looking forward to it.