[wp-hackers] Child themes, theme revisions, and the theme editor

[Mike Schinkel]

Nice idea.  

It will be nice to see themes saves with AJAX so that saving a theme doesn't have to reload everything and reposition the editor.

What's more if till be nice if you can sandbox an entire theme because a broken php tag in almost any page can bring down a although I know this would increase the scope of work.

-Mike

On Mar 22, 2010, at 8:13 PM, Andrew Nacin wrote:

> Hackers -- I am constructing a proposal to overhaul the theme editor. I
> would appreciate your thoughts on some of the ideas thus far:
> 
> * Better theme management
>  - Theme revisioning, versioning, snapshots, rollbacks, etc.
> 
> * Child theme generation
>  - Creating and switching to a child theme when editing a theme (allows
> revisions to play nice with upgrades)
> 
> * Sandboxing functions.php
>  - Unlike templates, a syntax error in functions.php can take down the
> whole blog and force you to open an FTP client
> 
> * Syntax highlighting
>  - Live highlighting in the theme editor, if a suitable replacement for
> CodePress can be identified
>  - Highlighted diffs of theme revisions
> 
> I know most of you are power users and developers, and may despise the theme
> editor. For many WordPress users, the theme editor is an indispensable tool
> (and it's not going anywhere). Theme developers may also appreciate a theme
> editor that, while potentially encouraging revisions, also discourages
> editing a theme directly (via child theme generation).
> 
> This will probably become a Google Summer of Code proposal.
> 
> Thanks for your help,
> Nacin
> --
> (This proposal is also outlined more in depth in a blog post:
> http://bit.ly/chQssV)
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