From what I have seen is that there is a check to see if theme.php exists and if it does use it.

So it seems that you could. I haven't tested it, but the code is there.

I will test this tonight and report back. Thanks for the post!

Yeah, we know you can... but it will not compile in templates_c.

So the question was originally.

If we are using a theme.php we noticed that it will not compile in templates_c, why?

it's been awhile, and I haven't slept in a day or two; so I cannot really remember what broke by using a theme.php. I think it was the smarty, perhaps Sublime will come in and clarify.

Right now I can make a theme.php and run it in xoops, and it "works" just fine (as far as theming the pages, etc), but it wont cache. That's why I made the post in the first place, it doesn't parse smarty so I couldn't use smarty and therefor doesn't compile each page in templates_c. That's what I was referring to with "breaking some core function of xoops" and that's why i was suggesting a normal caching function instead of depending on smarty's compiling system which is being used as a page cache.

So yeah, if I wanted each page to have to be generated from the theme.php every time a page was viewed instead of just read from a cache, then sure, I could use a theme.php with the current system....but who would want that.