Currently visual presentation of XOOPS pages separated into two parts - themes and templates - and it give additional power to designers.
But strong side is also weak side sometimes...
Some themes look better with own templates, some themes require custom templates and doesn't work without it.
And, at the same time we have ability to change theme interactively on frontend, but haven't such possibilty for templates, which make some themes unusable without admin's intervention or "at all", if theme-changer used on site.
What I want to see in future is ability
- define theme's templateset somewhere-somehow in theme, store and use this relation in theme-change procedure
I.e something like (pseudocode)
$xoops_template = mytemplate
or
$xoops_template = current

in first case selecting theme will change template to "mytemplate" (which was installed by admin before)
in second case template isn't mandatory and active template set can be used even after changing theme.
Maybe, this data can be stored outside theme.html in external file (theme.xml - as example, which give ability to store any amount of theme-dependent parameters, if it will be needed for some reasons)

install templates in with the theme:

/themes/mythemes/templates/news/
/themes/mythemes/templates/newbb/

Quote:
Sorry, maybe I'm full stupid idiot or overlooked something, but I never see any info about this technique...
Can you give me some details (or URLs, if it was discussed a millons times before me)?
And, AFAIS, it can't (?) solve problem with already released themes with custom templates?!