Make themes a top priority

[oaao]

After spending over a month with ORE, I can say that the bulk of my time has been spent in trying to safely override layout. (Safe meaning not breaking future upgrades)

It would help if all layout files/views were in a default theme: ./themes/default/...
so you could quickly override any content by copying the same file into your own theme: ./themes/my-site/
This should include modules/widgets/site views/etc. I believe this is a regular Yii convention.

On a similar note, layout hidden away in things like getPrettyPrice() could also be separated into a templated view with variables passed in:
themes/default/fragments/price.template.php (or just a translation key/val in the database?)
containing something like:
%price% %currency% %type%

so, for example, if you wanted to remove most of the extra text in "1,200 USD PER MONTH", you could change the above to
$%price%
leaving "$1,200"

It would also help if Javascript was kept out of views and/or separated into files. Let's say you need to make a few minor changes to the DOM structure, possibly just adding a class -- this almost always requires editing a file that has Javascript embedded in it, which will break future upgrades.

Anything else to help separate views and make theming easier would shave so much time off development. I like ORE and plan on using it multiple times, so this would have a big impact.

[oaao]

Additionally, it would help if the admin was using separate views from the front end, or at least the layout was separated more.

I had to edit modules/apartments/views/_view.php to change the layout for regular users, but this greatly impacted the admin editing screens, and made upgrading difficult.

[Koduc]

Thank for you note. We understand these problems and will try to resolve it.