Contrib.social

Allow customizing themes from the UI

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 22 November 2008, over 16 years ago
Updated 1 July 2025, 2 days ago

Drupal Themes that are available in the download section are for the most part very specific, bland, or just plain bad.

The Problem:

  • As a non-developer you want a function in your Drupal site, you download a module, install it, and configure it to your custom needs, no developing experience needed. As a non-designer you want to theme your site so it doesn't look like every other Drupal site out there...you are out of luck.
  • There are no standards for which people make themes for the public to download, some of them aren't even browser compatible.
  • It is very hard and time consuming to make a good theme, then have all of your time spent answering questions about how to change something, like font, or width of a column.

The Solution:

  • Make changing simple things in a theme user friendly, make a UI. There is a color module, you can make custom panels with the panels module and specify widths, why can't a person go to a theme UI and change font size, family, or change the width of the right hand column?...which integrates with the next point.
  • Have a handful of standard layouts that all themes fall into, Wide Web 2.0 Style, Single Column, Two and Three Column, Etc.:
    1. So when you are browsing themes, you can have layout in mind and go straight to that instead of browsing through all themes.
    2. There would be shells of themes that have already been through browser compatibility checks, then you build your theme inside the shell theme. This would save time and energy on everybody's part.
  • By having your theme within a predetermined layout when somebody wants to change the width of the left hand column through a UI it makes sense and would be easy for the end user to do, same with fonts and other smaller tasks.

All of the above, of course like anything in Drupal, can and should be able to be overridden, those ideas are mainly for those who do not know how to work html, or css, just like using a module, comes with options to easily configure.

These are just concepts that have been on my mind for a while. Maybe not practical, but thought I should get some opinions.
I just don't see why Drupal has been striving to make it very easy to implement a website, but this portion has been left behind, way behind.

I leave the floor open for discussion...

✨ Feature request
Status

Postponed: needs info

Component

Idea

Created by

🇺🇸United States hankpalan.com

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