Tao: Where We Are and Where We’re Going

Posted Oct 11, 2011 // 2 comments

In September we released a new beta version of Tao for the first time in 11 months. A lot has happened in those 11 months. Tao changed hands along with several other modules and themes, and it’s taken us some time to get up to speed on all the new code that we have committed to maintain.

The Beta 4 release included fixes for some annoying issues that have been hanging over our heads for a while, including the ‘Display author and date information’ checkbox not working, duplicate titles on node pages, and several others.

In the coming weeks and months, expect to see more bug fixing and another beta release, with the focus being on the Drupal 7 version first. We’re going to take Tao (and Rubik) out of beta soon too once we get the issue queue down to a satisfactory length. In the meantime, we have released a 7.x-dev release which was sorely needed to allow everyone to get the latest fixes as soon as possible.

And with regards to HTML5, yes, it’s on our radar. Moving Tao to HTML5 would be no small task. It would require almost a complete rewrite of the theme. We would create a new “Version 4” of Tao, since Rubik and other themes rely on Tao now. The way we see it, Tao would come first, and then upgrading Rubik to HTML5 would be the next logical step. We are taking stock now of how the community is using this theme, and where we might find collaboration to accomplish this undertaking, and will keep you informed with future releases of our progress on this question.

Regardless, we’re not going to attack HTML5 just yet. The priority right now is to get any outstanding bugs fixed. Once we’ve done that, we will start to talk about HTML5.

Thanks to all the contributors out there submitting patches. I promise you, we are reviewing them. Please keep them coming!