In detail, the changes are as follows:

CSS Changes

Files rework

We've eliminated the basemod_*.css files to reduce the quantity of CSS files requested to the server. Before this rework, BlankTheme requested the /styles/layout_$layout.css file. It included the basemod.css, basemod_$layout.css content.css, and print_*.css; five CSS files in total. Now, it's possible to just use two (with an advanced set up), including the basemod.css and content.css files directly from the header, but by now, three files are used to conserve the YAML framework structure: the /styles/layout_$layout.css file is the one that includes the basemod and content styles. The print layout is commented in there and not included by default, and can be enabled if needed.

All the CSS rules if the basemod_*.css files are now in the content.css file. To achieve this, the body CSS classes were redistributed and page CSS classes were added.

basemod and content changes

To make things clear, now the basemod.css is focused to layout only CSS, and content.css is oriented to content items styles. All the stuff related to content items in the basemod.css was moved to content.css, and now there (and only there) are the Theme specific styles, Zikula Specific styles, Fixes, Core overrides, Value Addons, Blocks and Specific Zones sections.

With the free space in the basemod.css, we can put there all the specific templates styles, and there you'll find from now the customized styles for the 2col and 3col templates, and its available layouts.

XHTML changes

The first detail with the templates is the cleaning of its code. The template, layout and current parameters are not needed and were removed. Second detail: as mentioned above, the body CSS classes needed a rework to allow the elimination of the basemod_*.css files. For this purpose, and to improve the maintainability, the body and the new page classes are generated by a new centralized plugin; that's the change in the templates, a new call in the /templates/includes files to generate the page classes (based in the current layout).

Plugin changes

To avoid the overhead when use many plugins, some common HTML output was centralized in a new plugin called 'bt_htmloutput'. It now contains the HTML HEAD output, to include the layout_$layout.css file and the ie hacks; also the dynamic generation of the body and page CSS classes; and finally the required Javascript and HTML to use the font-resize feature. New cases can be included there for simple tasks like a customized set of userlinks in the #navtop, and others specific requirements.

ToDo list before the 0.9 release

Now we need to sync the current themes to the new schema, and receive some feedback around the recent changes. This rework was motivated by some comments of BlankTheme users, and thinking in the improvement of include stuff with ease with an easy maintainibility.

Thanks to all and Enjoy!