Are there any theme dev guidelines available

Finne

Hey
Just rediscovered Vanilla & started hacking on some theme ideas with 2.1b2. Are there any specific guidelines/roadmaps/code style guides etc available to theme devs? For example, would tpl based themes be preferable to ones written with pure php?

hgtonight

Welcome to the community!

I personally prefer tpl themes just as a way to keep application logic from seeping into the theme. In the end, the tpl file gets cached into a php file anyway, so there isn't a performance gain to be had.

What other kind of questions do you have?

Linc

Howdy @Finne, glad you rediscovered us

The dev team has moved exclusively to .tpl as we create more and more Smarty functions to enable more flexibility in them.

Finne

Cool, thanks for the replies

Is there a definitive list of smarty tags available anywhere that I might have missed? Ive searched the forums and the 2 wikis that I could find(vanillawiki.homebrewforums.net/ & vanilla-wiki.info/ - both helpful) & found what seem to be the 'basic' tags but for more specific items, I've been reversing engineering things.

Kasper

All the core Smarty functions and modifiers can be found here: https://github.com/vanillaforums/Garden/tree/master/library/vendors/SmartyPlugins

{debug} is another good one that will show you all the variables available on any given page.

Finne

I've been using {debug} and it has been a lifesaver so far I'll dig through the github repo as well - thank you.

peregrine

you are aware of this folder correct

/library/vendors/SmartyPlugins

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/171162/#Comment_171162

http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/167432#Comment_167432

edited: and this as well.
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/162608/#Comment_162608

Since you can do it via {debug}
this link is a bit dated
http://vanillaforums.org/discussion/comment/163138#Comment_163138

Another thing to consider is if you want to modify and override views in your theme
downside - theme can be outdated and (could be but not necessarily) insecure since it won't reflect the latest core code view unless theme constantly updated to coincide with latest view.

However, themehooks - would be a good way to go for more modifications