Tree House Interactive Media put on a talk this afternoon about enterprise level theming and how they built the mylifetime.com site. The high traffic highly monetized site was the case study for their session and the basis for their new Themester module that will be released shortly.
The session was more of a best practices that focused on lessons learned and explained some of the ideas and implementation details behind Themester. One thing that they said resonated with me though. Many clients (the main users of a CMS) follow no predictable pattern for their use od tags and styles when entering content on their sites. There is some huge benefit to be gained form providing a style guide to not only site/theme developers, but also to users entering content. Develop a plan for consistent usage of tags, when to use an h1, how p and span tags are to be used, etc. Consistent usage of CSS styles and classes, what they are used for and how they are to be used. Again for BOTH theme developers and for content entry folks.
The later portions of the session focused on how using URL paths can be used not only to selectively apply CS, JavaScript, SWF, templates, etc, but how that same URL path is used for targeting of ad content and tracking usage of channels/segments. mylifetime.com is a highly monetized site, much money is driven off of ads, etc and clients are very specific about what, where and when they want their ads displayed. For this show and NOT this show, etc.