Brad and I were talking the other day about possible things to make eoCMS's theme system better, and he showed me the eoPanel site, using eoCMS, with a 2 column layout. I personally find this MUCH nicer looking than the 3 column layout.

Here are a list of pro's and con's for each of the systems.

3 Column

Pros - Lots of panels, gives a lot of information.

Cons - Looks crowded, if you don't have a lot of content you want to put outside of your main content, it might look too "spacey", themes often look unaligned with the panels and main body content. This is my biggest complaint with eoCMS.

2 Column

Pros - Good look, nice and organized, aligned well, simple and small, especially for people still running on older computers, laptops, or netbooks.

Cons - If you've got a lot of content, this might become a problem.

Now, I know you can go in and exclude panels from pages, but who really wants to do that? Plus, even though you exclude panels it STILL keeps the original theme width, thus looking cramped and crowded to anyone running less than 1440x900 resolution (in my opinion).

My proposal: Include a multi-column theme option. This includes the original layout, a 2 column layout, and a 1 column layout (note that I include the center body as a category).

I think it would certainly give people more options, as said the column exclusion option is nice, but who wants to look up the names of the places and type them in? Who wants to have a very wide theme with 2 columns? That would look silly.

The best option would be a switch in the back end to swap between them. A quick 'settings' check for one or the other and spit out a corresponding style class name would easily remedy it code side.

My 2 cents.

When I removed the left column I just read through the theme functions until I found left-panel, then modified the CSS, but I agree this is  a quite long winded way.

This, in my opinion, would be best.  I do agree with 2 columns looking much better.