Part 2 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.
Well, one plane flight down, and a conference to go, I have the main structure of the theme set up (locally; haven't pushed it out to opensourcecatholic.com yet). I decided to go with Zen 2.x's -dev releases, for the simple fact that it's new and the way the Zen project is moving. There are a few rough areas in the documentation, mostly in the 'Readme' file for installing a subtheme, but I got through everything okay.
This theme, I hope, will make its way onto the fine Drupal.org theme repository; getting a CVS account, I'm sure, will be fun ;-)
I started with the very bare layout I had made for the OSC splash page. Then I posted a couple sample blog posts, articles, and other items, and went to town theming all the common HTML elements, positioning the navigation items, and doing some (very) basic testing in IE. Here's a rough idea of how the theme looks at this stage in the game:
Now, mind you, this is quite rough; I was focusing on the main layout for most of the plane flight, and I haven't even gotten around to theming all the listings, more blocks, etc.
But hopefully you have a general idea of where I'm going; I decided to use a digg-like navigation look (border-radius ftw!), and went with Warnock Pro for headings (why not? If you don't have that, you'll at least get Georgia!). I'm still not 100% happy with the 'Zen' way of having Navigation all the way at the bottom for a simple site where there are only a few links. I don't think it negatively impacts SEO much if at all, and although it's a good display of the idea of structure separate from form, it might simply not be worth the hassle.
I'm sticking to the KISS principle for this site, and hopefully will have a very clean, modern look to the site (right now I'm titling the them 'Blue Airy'). I'll keep you posted throughout the rest of the weekend, but postings tomorrow will be very sparse indeed, as I'll be at a conference all day!
