Anyhow, I can see your point about tags opening in one file and closing in another. What I like about that convention is that it lets you check for correctness via internal consistency — an editor that checks matched tags can easily “validate” that aspect of the theme.

Keep in mind that Habari has the capability of supporting multiple theme engines, so while WordPress converts might like the sloppy style of code to which they’ve become accustomed (*cough*), you might enjoy something a little more fault-tolerant.

I think the community will welcome suggestions like these, and while I’ll be dragging this one back to share at our campfire, I invite you and anyone to stop by even if just for s’mores.

Yes, there’s little doubt that adding everything to home.php is currently technically possible. However, when people look at what’s currently there, it suggests that splitting off the header and footer is “the way” to design your theme. Whenever I code extensions for existing projects (such as Joomla!), I always try to follow convention so that it makes sense to whoever has to maintain the code later. I feel very strongly that a convention where tags open in one file and close in another is a bad one.

On the other hand, one thing I have to keep in mind is that when you do a website in blog format it usually dictates a certain design. Hard coding specific elements into the theme might make more sense here. CMSes might benefit more from a “freeform” system than blogs.

These suggestions are good ones, although I also expect that the abundance of WordPress theme developers would disagree with the premise that it’s entirely “bad”. I hope that there is a balance we can strike between these models or a way we can offer access to both types of themes.

Any designers or theme builders who want to help influence the theme-building fundamentals for Habari should start up a discussion on our mailing list.

Thanks for taking the time for the review, and hope you keep watching as we move forward!