Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

I am trying to develop a themes module for my new PHP intranet that will allow me to easily install themes. I plan to create an update site which holds all of the available themes. Each theme will be identified by an XML descriptor file which contains all of the properties for the theme. On the update site, a service will scan all of the folders on the site and parse all of the XML descriptor files. The theme information will then be collected and summarized then stored in a global themes file. This way, when someone does an update, they can just retrieve one file from the update server to build a list of available themes to download.

I’m thinking of having two different types of themes. One set of themes will be for the public site while the other will be strictly for the control panel. Users are free to mix and match themes so that the theme for the public site doesn’t need to match the one used on the control panel. Although they share a lot of the same components, it’s better to keep them separate so there is no confusion over what elements are specific to the public and which elements are specific to the control panel (and which elements are shared by both.)

Another feature I would like to have is the ability to customize a theme. So if a user doesn’t like one particular aspect of the theme, they can use a web-based theme editor to tweak the parts that they wish to improve. This should provide maximum flexibility when working with themes. I’m really hoping to get the theme support done quickly so I can open up the demo site to everyone.