web

Part 3 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.

Now that my feet are firmly on the ground (and hopefully will stay that way for a time), I have a little time to write about the final stages of the Open Source Catholic website development... even though it's tagged as in 'beta.'

On the plane flight home, I was mostly finished creating the theme for the site. I hadn't opened it up in IE 6/7/8 yet, but I knew the main three or four bugs that would crop up, and prepared for them. I decided to write some postings (two articles, two blog posts, and a website review) for the website, as it's never a good idea to try to build momentum for a website on which nothing exists!

I wrote the posts, edited them a little, then browsed every page on the site once or twice, fixing little CSS bugs and tweaking the design until it was just-so. I had created the header image in Photoshop, and I worked to make it so it would be easy to change if I needed to—especially when (if ever) the site goes out of beta status.

Next, I did a little (VERY little) performance testing, and made sure things were working well on the backend. I didn't Boost the site (I don't think that'll be necessary... at least not yet), but I did turn on page caching, CSS and JavaScript aggregation, and am working on following the rest of the YSlow rules.

The second-to-last step on this site was to open it in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (I haven't tested 6 yet) to make sure there were no show-stopping bugs. Luckily, there really weren't; just one column that kept floating right behind the content. I fixed that by floating the 'second' column to the right instead of left, and adjusting its margins accordingly.

The last step I have is to monitor the site's performance and metrics, test from an end-user's perspective, and make sure the 'moderator' role has the right permissions/access to do everything he or she will need to to keep the site in tip-top shape.

I haven't tried the Flag module yet, but I may at some point; seems pretty interesting to me! Also, I'm going to try to submit the theme, "Airy Blue," to Drupal.org's theme repository... wish me luck!

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!

Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).

Drupalers (myself included) are currently working on fixing the core template files in Drupal so they will provide enough CSS selectors to make web designers happy. We've finished the main template file, which lays out every page on a Drupal site. We're currently working on the 'node' template file, which lays out the main content area of each 'node' in Drupal. By the time Drupal 7 is released, we should have all the main template files fixed to the point where anyone can build a new theme for Drupal without ever seeing a line of PHP.

One area that needs a ton of help, though, is the Drupal 6 Theme Guide in the Drupal.org Handbooks. I've added one page (see the link at the top of this post), but the bigger problem is the disorganized nature of all the pages in the Drupal 6 handbook. I hope that we can get the pages organized in a logical and coherent manner, removing pages when needed, adding others, and rounding out the categories in an easy-to-remember way. Fellow Drupalers: what will you do to help?

I was browsing the Drupal Theme Garden a few days ago and was reflecting on how incredibly boring (if not ugly) a large share of the themes looked. Out of all the themes I viewed (over 50), I might consider using only 10 or so on a production site for a quick project that I didn't want to create a theme for.

Later on, I read this post on Steven Witten's blog [Acko.net] from 2007, and read through every single comment, because I am extremely interested in the issue of Drupal theming. If you are at all interested in helping Drupal be more themeable and appealing to designers, you must read the post linked to above. Go ahead - read it. I'll wait...

...okay, now that you're back,

A few of the comments in Steve's blog post deserve a mention...

From the blog posting itself: "Not enough Drupal people are savvy enough about theming and design to help out with even small tasks (like a banner) or even give quality tips and feedback on other work. The result is that theming and design receives little attention. Most contributed themes and sites could look a lot better, if they just themed it some more. And getting patches into core that give the defaults a little more oomph is tough, as they are often considered to be useless embellishments.

Earlier today, Apple announced they were starting a beta service of iWork applications online, free for anyone (with a licensed copy of iWork '09) to try, called iWork.com. The premise is this: You make a document in, say, Pages, and then click a button to put it online. You let your editor/friend know the document is online, and then he or she can login to the iWork website, view the document as you created it, and put sticky notes on it. This way, the editor/friend doesn't have to have a certain application (like Word) on his or her computer to view or make notes on your document.

Apple's not the first to have a product like this—Google has had its 'Docs' suite of online writing/sharing applications for a couple years already (it's free and it also lets everyone work on the document together)—but they have the opportunity to win the Online Office Suite battle, which has barely begun.