I’ve been reading a lot about child themes at ThemeShaper; about how you can override parts of a theme without modifying the theme itself, and it occured to me that, assuming it is possible, there may be something to be gained by chaining child themes together.
The basic idea behind child themes is that your main theme is built to be extensible and alterable, and then you apply a child theme to that in order to add colour or override parts of the base theme. Ian Stewart’s thematic is an example of the base theme.
It occured to me that if you could chain these child themes, i.e. base one child theme on another, you could create a series of interchangeable parts, none of which would need alteration, and all of which could be extended or added to by others.
For example, imagine 20 different choices of headers, 10 different types of page menu, 30 different types of post, all topped off with hundreds of colour and typography combinations.
I have no idea how practical it is, or even if it is possible. But it is something to think about.
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This sounds similar to what Alex King developed with his Carrington Theme framework.
It seems like it was built with the mindset of modular development. Adding pieces together to deliver content base on what is requested. It’s definitely a different approah from child theming, but the same idea nonetheless.
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Jake, It is more than that. Child themes mean you don’t need to edit the original. You can overide the content of the original, and it can be more than just the stylesheet. Chaining them would mean you could overidde different bits of it using options from different authors.
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Isn’t this a little bit like what K2 does? With it’s styles? One of my major attractions to K2 is that I only have to edit a stylesheet to change the looks of things, and I can switch back and forth from stylesheets rather easily.