Remove the ability to provide a 'pattern' in hook_theme()

Created on 13 August 2013, about 12 years ago

Updated 19 August 2025, 2 months ago

Problem/Motivation

There are far, far too many ways to do exactly the same thing in Drupal. In particular, there are 4 ways to provide theme_hook_suggestions for Drupal 8:

provide a pattern in hook_theme
implement hook_template_suggestions()
implement hook_template_suggestions_alter()
pass an array to theme()

Proposed resolution

If we were to remove pattern from hook_theme, there would only be three ways to do the same thing.

From the API:

pattern: A regular expression pattern to be used to allow this theme implementation to have a dynamic name. The convention is to use __ to differentiate the dynamic portion of the theme.

For all current uses of 'pattern' in core we should use hook_template_suggestions() instead.

Remaining tasks

Remove pattern from hook_theme().

User interface changes

None.

API changes

Remove pattern from hook_theme().

📌 Task

Status

Postponed: needs info

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

theme system

Created by

🇺🇸United States jenlampton

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.

API change
Changes an existing API or subsystem. Not backportable to earlier major versions, unless absolutely required to fix a critical bug.

theme system cleanup

stale-issue-cleanup
To track issues in the developing policy for closing stale issues, [Policy, no patch] closing older issues

Incomplete comments

Comments & Activities

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Comment 2 months ago →
🇺🇸United States smustgrave
Thank you for creating this issue to improve Drupal.

We are working to decide if this task is still relevant to a currently supported version of Drupal. There hasn't been any discussion here for over 8 years which suggests that this has either been implemented or is no longer relevant. Your thoughts on this will allow a decision to be made.

Since we need more information to move forward with this issue, the status is now Postponed (maintainer needs more info). If we don't receive additional information to help with the issue, it may be closed after three months.

Thanks!

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