TL;DR - we will be deprecating some Friendica themes and providing an admin interface to select which available themes will be visible to site members.

I probably need some help on this as I've got a lot of projects. But I think it's time to phase out the loozah themes, and the universally hated "easterbunny". There are several people currently using the loozah themes so we won't remove them. We will just consider them deprecated, and when a new theme management interface is implemented, they will become unsupported.

Theme Management

In order to pull this off with the least amount of disruption and angst, here's the plan....

The theme management (admin) interface should closely mimic the plugin administration page, but in this case will choose which themes are available for members to select. If they aren't ticked "green", they won't be offered as a choice (but existing members using those themes may still continue to use them). However, if somebody changes from one of these themes to something else, they won't be offered a choice to switch back.

I'm thinking each theme entry on this page should display the contents of a README.md or README.bb and provide a screenshot.

We should also provide a dynamically updated screenshot on the end-user theme selection so somebody can see at a glance if they want to try the theme or not - and without committing to it.

Once this interface is completed, we will generate a config list of supported themes as an automatic update and supply the same in the default htconfig for new installations - and this will remove the deprecated themes from the list of available choices for end-users, but allow the files to remain.

Also at this time, the deprecated themes will become unsupported and will require volunteer support to update with any future code changes.

At the present time, I'll maintain the zeros and testbubble. Fabio and/or Tobias will likely keep Quattro current, and Fabio and myself will manage templates for these three families. Derivatives of all of these should be fine. Others such as vier and dispy will need to be maintained by others.

(It isn't clear but perhaps vier might work better as a derivative theme, depending on the number of changes anticipated from its quattro roots. This will make it easier to support. Unless somebody is willing to commit to maintaining Dispy it will likely become unsupported also.)

Once all this is in place, new themes (except for low-maintenance derivatives) will most likely require a maintainer. We will probably also need a theme-dev forum to communicate core changes which might affect themes, so that maintainers aren't caught off guard.

And of course all of this may change completely based on community feedback. Let it begin.