[wp-hackers] child themes of child themes (grandchildren)

[Mike Schinkel]

On Nov 9, 2012, at 1:54 PM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:
> See, I fully agree with Mike in that when you have a hammer,
> everything looks like a nail.

Thanks. But I figured I should elaborate on that. 

What I was implying was that WordPress hammer is it's support of parent and child themes and lack of support for plugin/library dependencies and that the nails are parent and child themes. So when people really need a screw they keep using nails.

Specifically what WordPress is missing is the ability for a theme to depend on a library/plugin and an ability for the theme to manage that dependency.  Many theme Frameworks have been packaged as parent themes when they really should be plugins/libraries and their child themes should be packages as parent themes. But because themes can't auto-install plugins/libraries that they depends on few if any theme vendors have chosen to package them in this manner. So theme vendors only use nails because using screws would require them to put more burden on their customers than they believe the customers would accept.  JMTCW of course.

Hopefully this ticket will get traction and reconcile the issue:

http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/22316

-Mike