I finally came about to changing the look of this blog. It is a new css-based design. It might get heavyish on some machines+browsers, but to be honest I can't care less about it.

This design is kind of a proof for the themability of drupal. It took me about 20 minutes to convert this from a plain html with embedded stylesheet to page.tpl.php+css.

If I can do it, any monkey should be able to.

Update: thanks to rkerr & |gatsby| I've fugured out that I have a slight problem in IE - unreadable. The bloody boxes and png transparency problems. Now it should be much better.

Thanks guys

Upgraded and reskinned the IPROMS conference website.

While there is still some polishing to do on the visuals, the overall design will remain as it is. I will need to put new functionality there. At the moment I'm experimenting with a few approaches to importing OOo Impress presentations. That is a challenge which needs to be solved, but I'm still not sure what is optimal. The Open Document standard is a weird beast, I think a weird bad beast. I wish I could use docbook for this purpose, but that is a dream, which won't come true.

This is just a sketch, primarily for personal use, but anyone is welcome.

Combining modular drupal.css with forms api can potentially revolutionise theme packs with drupal.

Just consider this. If you have colour, framing, typography and icons split into different stylesheets, all you need to do to instruct the theme to use an alternative is to use a different color.css for example. This will introduce a different colour scheme, preserving everything else. $element['head']['style'][]='colour-1.css' kind of thing.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. What can prevent you from rendering the content into a non-html format using the themes only - RSS 1.0, RDF, OWL, RSS 2.0, Atom - essentially all of them share a lot with a node listing, only the syntax and the feature subset differ.

Space efficient web page layout is an often desired, but rarely achieved design goal. The problem comes from one of the main side effects of the web technology - you never know how big is the screen of the viewer. Some "solutions" you might encounter are

• old-school "best viewed at XxZ resolution"
• fixed width layouts, centered on page - a lot of blogs use that
• fixed width layouts, left or right aligned - have a look at the bbc website
• using the "defect" as a design feature

You can find a lot of good examples for all of the above at the csszengarden.

I continued working on the current dikini.net theme. It is an intresting exercise. So here is what I aim for:

1. modular stylesheets: typography.css, framing.css, colors.css & friends
2. page.tpl.php should allow for a multicolumn design, with arbitrary column order
3. vertical positioning of elements within columns
4. no faux columns
5. a series of variation themes(styles), based on different layouts and colour schemes

Status:
1 - complete, including an unofficial, experimental split of drupal.css
2,3,4 - half there
5 - have a couple of

The multicol goodness works very nice with print layouts. By that I mean it works as you would expect. The only glitches I've found are related to very long unbrakeable text. But that is not their fault anyway.

Come on, give it a try. I have created a print stylesheet to accompany this drupal theme. It hides all web-related elements, leaving just the header and content proper. You can see the behaviour by doing print preview or by simply printing it, but please save the dead trees. If you want to see the behaviour across multiple pages, go to my Relations, SQL, views, algebra or how to cook that broth post. It should spread over a couple of pages.

just a few minor css tweaks, but a big change.

After a few longer workdays, finally the first stage of the 4M NOE's website re-design is finished.

It was interesting mainly from the communications point of view. I think I learned some things in that area. Otherwise the website is (somewhat) sectioned into four distinct areas. I really like the idea of having icons for them in the sidebar. From a visual point of view I like the distinct sidebar as well. It clearly separates the visual concerns - content and navigation/utilities.

Fair enough - there is a lot still to do: