m42|templates

I just committed the initial Drupal 6 version of the Ubiquity Drupal theme to the CVS tree at drupal.org
There should be 6.x-dev version available in 12 hours.
Would love to hear your feedback at the issue queue at drupal.org

Update: Download the development snapshot from the Ubiquity project page.

Really tons of widgets, handy scripts, css snippets, html codes and various tools are out there that you can use on your websites and blogs. These tools — if not used by default — can also inspire you to achieve your designing or usability goals. I came up with this list of 22 of most helpful stuff. Some of these are pretty old, but I you won’t believe how many people never even heard about them, but most of these brilliant ideas are easy to implement to your template, whether it is for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla or even Zen-Cart and the like…

In today’s excercise, we are going to adapt some nice styles to the Drupal menu items. There is a widely known CSS technique called sliding doors which became very popular since it became published. We are going to spice this a little more with extra hover states and implement sprites to improve the performance a little. This will involve a little PHP code – overriding a themeable function, and some CSS markup.

A little foreword on Drupal theming

Most of you reading now aware of that it’s said: Drupal is a great CMS. It is a completely flexible platform and serves as a great foundation to build nearly any kind of website. It has a well structured system which nearly completely separates code, content and style. Perhaps this flexibility causes most issues when dealing with theming. Creating templates for Drupal is wonderfully simple when it comes to the basics. Vast documentation and a helpful community stands there for the template developer but there are so many possibilities and so many available options that it’s often not enough.

It's been quite a few months since the book came out and I could hardly sacrifice the time to read through, but finally I did it. While I was reading I came to realize that it's simply far more easier to understand that many of the dev books around. I bet many of you think that Drupal is a really powerful and flexible content management system, but also many of you think that it can really be a pain in the back, a time waster what makes you an endless reader of the support forums.

In fact, if you're not too familiar with the techniques, you can ridiculously soon become frustrated if you want something beyond installing and posting content to your fresh site.

This book, the Pro Drupal Development written by John K. VanDyk and Matt Westgate is really easy to understand. Both of the main authors are core contributors of Drupal so you really get the insights of this project.