Will’s Similiblog

There are a lot of good themes for Drupal, but my needs were for something pretty clean and ‘academically professional.’ When someone ports the Mandigo WordPress theme (used on this WP blog) to Drupal I’ll jump for joy! But I found the Sky theme for Drupal, which I’m quite happy with. Find it in the Drupal project repository here.

Now there’s a trick with this theme - if all of your active blocks are configured in the right sidebar region, you’ll have a right-sidebar theme. However, if even one of your blocks is placed in the left sidebar, they’ll all show up on the left. (This is only apparent after you leave the blocks editing page; as on that page, all sideblocks show up on the left anyway, regardless of where you configure them).

I did a minor CSS hack on the theme, as I chose to close up the vertical height in the menu blocks a bit, so they’d look a bit tighter. So I opened up Sky/style.css, found all the line-height references in the sidebar section (starting around line 121), and changed these to 20px. Be sure to find the several references to line-height and change each of these.

The header image is bg-header.jpg, in Sky/images/ , and measures 120×960 pixels (note that the bottom 35px of this image will be masked by the primary links menu). I edited my pic in the most wonderful Graphic Converter, and saved optimized for web to minimize download time for users. (btw, the main header image on my Sandbox site is of the beautiful stream in Mostnica Gorge, near Stara Fužina, Slovenja).

After the theme was all configured and basic setup of the site was complete, I created several clones of the theme, naming each Sky-whatever, in the themes directory; differing from each other only in the header image. When Organic Groups are set up, the group author is able to select a theme for their group page from the list of activated themes; having a uniquely identifying header graphic for a group is a nice touch. But wait to do this until most of the rest of the site is configured, as some configuration steps will alter theme settings; and the voting module (for social rating of news feed items) requires a couple of minor hacks to your theme template files.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 1:36 am and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.