I am a joomla user before opencart one, joomla has a nice approach for positions on the template, as a designer you define your positions in theme's config file inside theme's folder, and within index.php ( main file for template ) you can echo content of any position with just one line code.
in opencart, designer can use one of 4 posions (left , right , top and bottom). yes he can add new positions to his theme but he will need to hack some core files or create ocmod modules.
my idea is :
opencart add such config.xml file for themes and in this file defines some info like verion , designer's info , email , and so on and list of positions on the theme, so in core file, before any thing, opens this file, read position lists and load modules or controllers or view or any thing else that user added into that positions. else is same, in the template file print modules using echo $position-name;
excuse me for my bad English
