Introducing Curved Slate: A New Drupal Theme Who's Time Has Come

"Oh... great....", says the audience of drupal users, "another free drupal theme -- that's almost good as another free bag of baby vomit."

So Why a New Theme? 

While there are many drupal themes for us to choose from, let's face it: most of them are either ugly (I'm not naming names), don't work on any browser besides firefox (way too many to list), or are way too complex to be effectively extended and customized (echm: friends-eclectic, and civicspace... I'm looking at you). Not to mention, a large number of themes are merely ports that weren't designed with drupal in mind.

For a long time I've built every new theme from box grey, and today was no exception. This afternoon, I was beginning to get a fresh box_grey installation ready for customization. After deleting nearly every entry in the stylesheet, pasting some trademark styles, and pasting a tableless layout to the page.tpl.php file, it suddenly occurred to me: "what the hell am I doing? I could write a book on drupal theming -- why don't I just build a new drupal theme that saves me, and the entire community time?". And thus, Curved Slate was born.

Goals of Curved Slate  

Overall: To provide a good base of styles, and markup for developers who design full-fledged enterprise-grade* drupal sites. I plan to accomplish this by:

1. Integrating the Nifty Corners technique into the theme. Screw corners -- eyes like curves. The nifty corner technique provides us a way to have curvy layouts without images, sliding doors, but less flexible techniques. What does that mean? Curves are a piece of cake to customize, and implement in the theme.

2. A tableless, flexible (read: no absolute positioning, or fixed width), 3-column layout with content at the top of the template, and sidebars at the bottom. Google gives special attention to content at the top of the page source -- this template keeps that in mind.

3. Making attractive typography the default -- no offense to box_grey.  

4. Full support of 4.7's new theme options.

5. Curvy form fields, and more attractive blocks. Special styles for links like "add comment", and special icons for blogposts in blocks.

So that's where I'm at right now for this themes goals. I plan to make the alpha version of theme available tomorrow for feedback. Currently, of these 5 goals, I got 1,2 and 5 done... Alpha needs all 5 according to my own magic plan.

Audience Participation Portion 

Question: What do you want this drupal theme that the current themes don't make available?