load plugin stylesheets from theme folder

[Danny Wahl]

Please make themes completely modular within their own folder, rather than having to create a new folder in a plugin for the theme.

Current (example):
/theme/default/static/style/style.css
/interaction/forum/theme/default/static/style/style.css

Proposed:
/theme/default/static/style/style.css
/theme/default/interaction/forum/static/style/style.css

The reason for the proposed change is to make themes fully modular, specifically when dealing with a version control system, specifically that all versioning is contained in the theme folder, rather than in the mahara root folder:

Current (example)
/.git

Proposed:
/theme/default/.git

From what I can tell this only affects the following file:

/lib/web.php

specifically around lines 331-337, it seems to just require changing the get_url() call to look in the theme directory rather than the plugin directory.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

This would be great for people creating new themes, and I'm not saying
it shouldn't happen, but I think it's unlikely to happen any time soon.

It would make plugins non-modular, and we'd get complaints from plugin
developers and installers. Currently, a new artefact plugin can be
dropped in say htdocs/artefact/foo and that's it. It'd be harder to
have to put files in htdocs/artefact/foo and
htdocs/theme/raw/artefact/foo/static/style/style.css,
htdocs/theme/default/artefact/foo/static/style/style.css, etc.

[Danny Wahl (danny-jl)]

What about if it were to support inheritance similar to the way that a child theme works with either style.css or calendar.css:

A plugin developer would create the following file:

htdocs/artefact/foo/bar.css

A Theme developer would create the following file:

htdocs/theme/default/artefact/foo/bar.css

then Mahara would do one of the following:

1) Load the plugin style then load the theme style (similar to style.css)
2) check for a theme style if it exists load it, if it doesn't then fall back to the plugin style (similar to calendar.css).