What is the best way to take the layout apart

Question

I would like to restructure the layout completly such that each element, e.g. qa-nav-user, , header, footer, etc., can be split up among several pages, iframes, etc. In other words: Keeping the QA base intact, while having a complete custom design.

Something I thought about would be to create a

qa-theme_header.php

qa-theme_main.php

....

file for each element and call it from the appropriate position on my website. However, it is not obvious to me, how to do that, since

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/8678/user-nav-etc-outside-qa

does not seem to work.

Thanks for any input,

n3rd

 

Answer 1

I like this concept. Templates for each page type, with tags for Q2A output blocks would make customization easier for non-programmers and increase the installed base.

I would like to see something like this in a future version.

Answer 2

You could create a plugin with a layer that replaces a high-level function in the base theme class, e.g. body_content() or main(), depending on how much you wanted to replace with templates. This could then open template files. You could also define functions to be accessed by those templates in order to embed all the different bits and pieces of Q2A content. It would be a rather huge job...