My Drupal Blog

There are two big Drupal theming discussions happening right now, which I'm sure a number of you are aware of, but for those who aren't here's a quick summary:

1. Project Plan For A New Default Drupal 7 Theme
First up, lots of interesting stuff regarding the Project Plan for a new default Drupal 7 theme.

Right now this is a wiki page with an 8 step plan addressing the question of 'How do we get a new default theme in core?'. Step 1 'Create a project plan' has its due date set at November 7, 2008 so get in there quick!

Also, it looks like there will be a theming contest to create Drupal 7 sub-themes for core, once the new base theme has been finalised, which I'm sure will be of interest to a number of themers out there.

2. Drupal.org Redesign
Secondly, lots of discussion regarding Prototype Iteration #5 (including initial visual design direction) of the drupal.org redesign, which has gone online here.

Comments, discussion, suggestions etc. are welcomed by the authors on both of these topics.

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.

After a few weeks of tinkering, I am pleased today to launch the newly redesigned Lhmdesign.

I'll be posting a detailed explanation of the site's construction (particularly the theming :) in a couple of days time, so please stick any questions you have about the new site in the comments.

Thanks!