My Drupal Blog

So, as promised, here's the full write up on the Lhmdesign redesign. I'll cover the whole site, but focus mainly on the blog section as it incorporates the more complex setup and theming.

Firstly, then, a few details:

• I built the site in Firefox, with frequent use of the ever awesome Firebug extension.
• IE7 corrections were handled using conditional comments placed in the page.tpl.php file.
• IE6 fixes were handled via a secondary style sheet - a process which I outlined previously here.
• Safari and Opera corrections are a straight up hack:
  @media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
  #divid {
    rules: here;
  }
}
• Blog posts are story nodes which, by default, are promoted to the front page and have comments enabled.
• Blog post tags are a vocabulary (admin/content/taxonomy/add/vocabulary).

The entire site is built on Drupal 5.7. I would have liked to build it on 6.x, but a number of the contributed modules used don't yet have 6.x support, so for now it's 5.7 all the way.

And speaking of modules (smooth eh ;) the ones I've used (excluding core required modules) are:

THEMING:

Due to the site being built on Drupal 5.7 the theme is also tailored for Drupal 5.x, so just be aware that all following references are as such.

One thing you can’t argue with when it comes to Drupal is that there sure are a lot of modules. In fact, a quick total up of Drupal modules for version 5 comes in at over twelve hundred (1200). And even if you knock off two hundred or so for instances where a module is listed in more than one category, that’s still around a thousand different modules that people might be using on their Drupal site. The point being, that each module will produce a different output which requires theming.

Now this isn’t a problem if you’re designing a theme for a specific client, because obviously that client will only want a finite amount of functionality, and will thus only be using a set number of modules – all of which they’ll tell you about (hopefully ;) ).

But what if you want to release a theme on drupal.org? How many modules should you provide theming for? And, for that matter, what’s the best way to go about creating themes which cover as wide a number of modules as possible?

The answer to the first question is ‘that depends’. A good rule of thumb is to say that you should, as a minimum requirement, be looking to create a theme which covers all of the core modules, both required and optional (a list of which can be found in the modules section of your site’s admin). But what about all the other modules?