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I'm a bit confused on when/if the themes tag should be used. For example, take the following question:

How to modify a core theme and what is the correct way to do this?

While looking through available tags, it seems as though the themes tag is there to address concerns with specific themes (in this case, the question asks about Bartik, but could also be applied to the small handful of core themes that exist).

However, I noticed it was soon removed, which is totally fine--I'm just looking for some guidance and/or documentation so I don't make a similar mistake again. I noticed some discussion on merging similar tags, though nothing on when this tag should or shouldn't be used beyond what is already in the tag description. If the tag isn't already deprecated, what are the best practices regarding use of this tag?

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It does seem like would be a perfectly reasonable tag for that question given the wording of the current wiki:

Topics related to Drupal themes.

A theme is a "skin" that lets you change the layout and appearance of a Drupal site quickly.

However that description is in the "old" style (if there is such a thing) as there have been discussions to improve tag wikis and excerpts that begin with "Topics related to" (see Calling for action: Help improving our tag wikis).

It may be that the tag is one of those that needs its wiki to be improved...and that it currently doesn't convey what actually is on topic for that tag.

The reason I'm thinking this is because the moderator who posted the call to action for tag wikis is the same one who removed the tag; they might have another purpose in mind for that tag but just not have had the time to implement the changes yet.

The other possible reason I can think of is that adding both and may be considered slightly redundant...it might be considered obvious that a question is asking about themes in general if it's specifically asking about theme templates.

There's a feeling amongst those in the higher echelons of StackExchange that having too many questions in too few tags is not good, and it should be avoided where at all possible. See the below for more discussion than you will ever have thought possible on the subject.

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  • Thanks for the clarification, Clive! As someone with roots in information architecture, you'd be surprised at how much discussion on tagging and vocabularies I believe to be possible. ;] I can see why more tags with fewer items can damage findability, especially when definitions aren't kept up to date, though it certainly warrants clarification. I'll consider how this might be best done and propose an edit. Thanks again!
    – David Watson
    Commented Mar 8, 2012 at 19:08
  • @DavidWatson No worries :)
    – Clive Mod
    Commented Mar 8, 2012 at 19:26
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I changed the excerpt for that tag to use the following text:

This tag is for questions about themes hosted on Drupal.org. Don't use it to generally mean "this question is about a theme," when the question is about a theme's code, or when the question is already using a specific tag, such as "theming," "theme-template," or a tag specific for the used theme, such as "zen."

As Clive already pointed, if two tags would be used from all the questions (such is in the case and would be used to generally mean "this question is about a module/theme") then those tags would be too broadly used, and they would stop to be useful.

The same "restriction" applied to applies to too. When a question is already tagged , there is no need to tag it too.

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