Announcing the Death of Sueetie Themes

[This is a repost from Dave Burke's blog.]

The post title is a play on "Announcing Sueetie Themes" where I described Sueetie’s new global theming architecture.  Today I am announcing that Sueetie Themes is no more.  Sueetie.org is now a kinder, gentler Sueetie without the baggage of a complicated theming model permeating the applications across the site.

There were a number of issues that finally caused the rollback trigger to be pulled, but suffice it to say Sueetie was going in the wrong direction.  Sueetie was never intended to be a mass-distributed application for users who fall into categories of Personal, Professional or Enterprise, who must acquire some sort of license based on Google Adword revenue or their number of forums.  Living with Sueetie Themes until death do us part symbolized a buy-in to that thinking.  Sueetie is better than that.  Besides, an architecture that is a combination of five or more separate applications by design makes a unified product offering with managed upgrade releases completely unrealistic.  I knew this from the beginning, but somehow forgot it.  Sueetie Themes and all of the accompanying discussions about add-ons, licensing and distribution helped me remember.

We’ve returned to a simple /masters folder at the site root for the top level framework pages and theming the applications according to their own logic.  Understanding how each of the applications handles theming is part of the price of admission, after all.  

A few screenshots to describe the basics of post-Sueetie Themes.  Our top level website supports its pages with three .masters and an accompanying /style directory whose style sheets are also shared with the applications.  Shared.css for site-wide style classes and individual [app].css sheets to supplement or overwrite the application's own .css classes.

Here we see the small amount of coding required to add site-wide styling to YetAnotherForum.NET in its ForumPage.cs base class file. YAF.NET theme logic executes, then the addition of /style/shared.css and /style/[app].css stylesheet.  And always in that order: shared.css, then [app].css.

Below is the Gallery Server Pro equivalent located in its GalleryPage.cs base class.

That's pretty much the extent of the technical description of Sueetie theming as it now exists.  More simple goodness, or at least I'd like to think so.  I concluded the Announcing Sueetie Themes post with "Now it's time to get back to that Sueetie Web Package!"  I lied.  NOW it's time to get back to that Web Package.  More on that soon.