Are template frameworks the best option? Do you do a lot of custom themeing? Is there something that can significantly help?

In the current age of Responsive Web Design (RWD) and multiple browsers, the issue has been writing lengthy css, with multiple media queries, that respond to browser size and work everywhere or fall back cleanly (non-CSS3 browsers). Let’s not even mention the browser specific css...

Power Themeing can be used by anyone who does theme work and writes CSS for any platform. This new way of thinking should push us past the days of relying on someone else’s responsive framework (Twitter Bootstrap, HTML5 Boilerplate, etc), to writing your own in the same amount of time. Frameworks can be powerful, but I fear that they are holding back innovation.

Enter Compass with its wonderful extensions. Compass is a, Ruby based, CSS authoring framework that uses Sass. Sass allows for variables, mixins, nesting, inheritance, and much more. These features reduce the amount of CSS you need to write. Compass takes Sass a step further. Compass adds multitudes of useful and intuitive functions.

All of the Compass goodness has been rolled into a Drupal base theme called Aurora, which is maintained by Ian Carrico and Sam Richard. Aurora also has a distribution called Corona that is built on Susy.

We will look at the power that this has for custom themeing.