Drupal Theme Developer GUI

The 'ol epic battle between designers and developers has kicked up some dust again in the Drupal world, just in time for DrupalCon Paris. I wish I could be there, not just because it's Paris, but because this time around I think I have an idea that's worth some attention from the community as a whole.

@purrin asked the other day,

If you could make one improvement to #Drupal to make it more #design friendly... What would it be?

and I twittered back...

GUIs for things currently buried under PHP; adding/manipulating variables (template.php), altering forms and breaking up $content

Then I started thinking... that's actually a really good idea. Why not a GUI for constructing preprocess functions, form_alter functions and all the other common theming tasks that require too much PHP knowledge for most HTML/CSS expert designers? If merlinofchaos was able to give us a relatively easy-to-use GUI for writing complex MYSQL queries and formatting the output, thereby shaving off a load of work for developers, why can't we do the same for the Themer's workload? Or better yet, allow the Themer to be all together cut out on projects that require it, and allow for less programming-savvy designers and CSS gurus to take hold of their Themes. We might even end up with some really awesome designer-contributed themes from this.

I sketched up a very rough idea for the Theme Developer GUI

Basically, it works a lot like Views, taking the user through a series of available options for manipulating a node, form, page, etc. At the end of this long process, our end result is twofold. First, the "rule" (or whatever it ends up being called) will be saved in the database so that it can be tweaked later. Secondly, the module will find the appropriate place within the selected theme's template.php file to place a preprocess function; or it will generate a properly named .tpl.php file with the user's HTML edits, or eventually, perhaps, it could even assist in creating theme settings and writing them to theme_settings.php.

So, my goal at the moment is to finish up my main presentation for DrupalCampATL, then start work on a proof-of-concept for the module, whether it be a very abbreviated demo of the module's functionality, or a set or more polished wireframes. Then, perhaps, I can recruit a developer or two to help me build this beast.