Drupal.org gets a make-over

By Steven on 18 Oct 2004 at 19:02 UTC

For Drupal 4.5 one of our action points was improving the Drupal.org site itself. As well as making information easier to find for users, we wanted to make the site friendlier for people who are new to Drupal. As part of this, a new look was designed for Drupal.org. The style, called Bluebeach, was inspired by the Bluemarine Xtemplate and was designed by me, Steven Wittens.

In order to keep Bluebeach as a unique style for Drupal.org, the theme will not be made available for download.

The theme itself is implemented as a template for the PHPTemplate theme engine. It is completely tableless, validates as XHTML 1.0 strict and has a fluid, variable-columns layout. It works mostly the same on IE6, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror/Safari. I first designed a graphical mock-up and then implemented it into XHTML as a Drupal theme, starting off with a basic front page and adding more stuff later on. Overall the theme is much more roomy and cheery than Bluemarine was.

Aside from the obvious change of looks, the most noticable content change is the 'mission statement' on the front page: it is no longer a short paragraph with some links, but a dedicated full-width space which attracts attention. It links to the Drupal brochure (designed by Kristjan Jansen for Drupal at LinuxTag), which is the easiest way for people to get an idea about what Drupal is. It also gives immediate access to the latest Drupal release and the associated downloads (modules, themes and translations).

Another important change was flattening the Drupal handbook so that less clicks are needed to find the information you need. Project.module was also updated, for example to take advantage of the tabs feature in Drupal 4.5.

We will still be tweaking the site in the near future, but in the meantime your comments and suggestions are welcome!

Comments

Wow

Robert Castelo commented 18 October 2004 at 20:01

Nice work!

Attention to detail is fantastic. I'm really enjoying looking around drupal.org and finding all the styling elements you've created, like what you've done with blockquotes for example.

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

any plans to update the theme?

kc commented 3 April 2006 at 06:15

Is there any plans to implement a new theme for Drupal.org.
Not because the current one is ugly or anything but it seems like people are getting excited when there is a change on the theme.

KC

My Sites:
www.educational-toys-mart.com | www.thelittlebig.com
http://pheromoneguide.com

Freaking good

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 18 October 2004 at 20:02

I only caught rumours a few hours ago that some new stuff is in order for Drupal.org, and I must say I am completely amazed! This is a very big step forward, much needed for Drupal. I also think that it is a key that this theme will not be released for the public, so it is kept for the Drupal homepage. The tabs are looking cool, but the blocks might need some more spice, colour, shape, or something more genuine. You might also think about styling form buttons.

Styling form elements

Steven commented 18 October 2004 at 20:24

I did play around with styling form buttons, but I ended up deleting it: it was too much of a hassle to get them to look right across browsers and platforms. On top of that, many platforms ignore form styles altogether and just use native widgets.

Styling form elements info

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 18 October 2004 at 20:50

I doubt you have not seen it yet, but Roger Johansson already collected quite bit of information on styling form elements.

must say

bertboerland commented 18 October 2004 at 21:31

wowsers, brand new look, much much better. please make sure to update the screenshots for 4.5

btw: is the new 3d logo official now?

--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

Drupal.org vs Drupal

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 17:42

The theme is for Drupal.org, not Drupal is general. I don't think we should update the screenshots.

Congrats!

Boris Mann commented 18 October 2004 at 20:05

Great work, Steven -- looks very nice. And PHPTemplate was a good choice, too.

I understand the desire not to distribute the Drupal look-and-feel, but perhaps a (designer centric) overview of how it was accomplished would be useful. As well, maybe the theme minus the graphical CSS (so just a layout.css)?

What I would like is for the

CodeMonkeyX commented 24 October 2004 at 17:38

What I would like is for the PHPTeample file that produces the standard complient XHTML 1.0 code. Maybe that should be intergrated in the the default PHPTemplate engine (if it has not been done already).

Once you have the clean XHTML output then the CSS is much easier too work with.

err. hasn't been done.

adrian commented 25 October 2004 at 09:17

PHPTemplate doesn't have a default that it ships with.

The proto template (that all documentation is based on) for phptemplate is called box_grey, which uses a hybrid layout, for various reasons.

--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

Never looked better! Keep up

Tim Larkin commented 18 October 2004 at 20:32

Never looked better!
Keep up the good work, and I can't wait for more new themes of this quality in the future.

Great!

Uwe Hermann commented 18 October 2004 at 20:42

The new theme is absolutely great! Congratulations! I didn't recognize the site anymore as I fist saw it :-)

Uwe.
--
My Drupal site: http://www.crazy-hacks.org
Soon to be drupalized: http://www.unmaintained-free-software.org

Looks great!

ericgundersen commented 18 October 2004 at 21:01

Nice work Drupal team. Can't wait to move our clients over to 4.5 and try out this theme.

Eric Gundersen
Development Seed
http://www.developmentseed.org
http://www.developmentseed.org/blog

Say wot?

SupaDucta commented 18 October 2004 at 21:01

Well, now that was a shock!

Excellent! Much, much warmer, elegant, better.

Congratulations on new 4.5 release to all the developers involved, and best of luck in further developments.

And to finish with:

ALL HAIL DRUPAL!

looks great, one suggestion

cel4145 commented 18 October 2004 at 21:04

I don't want to belittle how great the new theme looks, but I have one suggestion. Add a little padding to the blockquotes--or what ever is making the fancy background quotes (which are awesome)--so they don't hit right up against the text.

Awesome job!

Very nice

sepeck commented 18 October 2004 at 21:37

Very nice. It is much cleaner and easier on the eye. As much as I like it, I am glad that it is not in the basic theme's available for end users. To many sites look just like the bluemarine theme already.

-sp

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Uh oh, one issue

marqpdx commented 18 October 2004 at 21:37

Great new Look, Steve,
One issue i found is when i did a long search, the background turns Drupal blue at the point on the screen where the bottom-most right box ends, and that makes comments/search results below that point almost unreadable. I'm sure it's simple to fix.

Thanks again,
mark

min-height in CSS not supported by IE...

duntuk commented 18 October 2004 at 22:23

in mozilla FireFox is displays properly...

obviously IE is frowned upon around here...

Great!

axel commented 18 October 2004 at 21:49

Official Drupal site looks cool now! Very nice round corners in blocks (Mozilla's style feature?)

--
Axel,
Russian Drupal Community

No -moz-border-radius

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 17:47

I avoided -moz-border-radius for two reasons: 1) it's Mozilla-specific, 2) it's not anti-aliased.

Instead I used images in the corners along with repeated relative positioning to get them to cover up the standard rectangular border.

closed

bertboerland commented 19 October 2004 at 18:16

steven

I do think that it is a good thing not to release the theme wide so the drupal look will be associated with the powerfull drupal site/product, not a personal blog.

but please, when (if?) a new theme will be used on drupal.org release this theme because it is too cool.

and if you could, write a howto how you made this theme

--

groets

bertb

--
groets
bert boerland

Very nice work

chrismessina commented 18 October 2004 at 21:51

Hey Steven,

This is great. Thanks for setting the bar on new Drupal Themes. With what you've done here and what's been happening around the web, I think Drupal is quickly taking shape as a CMS that can also work for designers (though hopefully we can focus more effort on the theme creation process).

I'd love to see a write up of your process and the difficulties you encountered creating this theme. Sometime I'll do the same for the Spread Firefox theme once things die down a bit! :)

Chris

Awesome. Very simply shockin' awesome.

garym@teledyn.com commented 18 October 2004 at 22:31

a large contingent of drupalists in the back rows start to applaud, the front rows join in and stand, soon the whole room is clapping wildly and cheering

I'm sure it happened like that in all our minds. Bravo.

very nice

duntuk commented 18 October 2004 at 22:38

looks great... thumbs up...

and about the content overlapping the site background in IE... it doesn't really bother me... since it's valid CSS... though as a solution, you may just want to make the body tag hold the dominant #FFF background and just scrap the blue (since it's only seen on the bottom if you scroll down)

body {background:#FFF url("/images/site_bg.png") top left ;

Excellent!

javanaut commented 18 October 2004 at 23:35

I like the new softer look. It does look as though it will have more mass appeal (not just geared toward us geeks ;).

Awesome!!

inteja commented 18 October 2004 at 23:43

Nice work. A very pleasant and totally unexpected surprise!

Brian.

--
Brian.

Closed loop

red_eye commented 19 October 2004 at 00:36

Congratulations on the release. I've been using the RC for a bit now and I am quite happy with it. That said I must gripe. Ive seen two truly awesome themes come forth lately, BlueBeach and the one created for theme garden. Yet neither have been (and purportably wont be) released. Being a strong supporter of open source, and information sharing, I'm saddened by this. I am one who has always learned best by example, falling back on documentation only when I must.

The release of 4.5 is great but I cant help but notice the lack of themes. It seems to me that some of this can be blamed on the theme folk catching up with the changes(I've tinkered a bit myself with every theme I have run but the new xtemplate themes are beyond me as yet), but that part of this must be the sparceness of documentation. That leaves only examples to learn from for those who feel we must do it ourselves. I guess I am just bummed.

CSS and templates

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 00:59

I know how you feel: I also would like to help others make great Drupal themes. However, I don't think giving the entire theme up to the public is a good way to do that. There have been examples of stylesheets, images and templates being ripped from sites and used elsewhere without permission. Yes, even Drupal sites.

If we give away the template with a "only for educational use" label, those terms will be violated within 5 minutes. If people want to learn about the template, they can analyse the CSS and the XHTML. This is dead-easy with modern CSS tools like the Firefox/Mozilla Webdeveloper Extension which allows you to disect a page easily.

Any XHTML/CSS person who's afraid of looking at other people's tags and styles is a moron :P.

I understand what youre sayin

red_eye commented 19 October 2004 at 01:47

I understand what youre saying. However the extent of my web design experience ended years ago when HTML4 was still in the works, now trying to get back in its not easy. And lets face it, flat out daunting when you try to do something like add taxonomy_image to a recent theme where there is no patch and the file structure is so hard to make sense of (thmes.inc, engines, xtemplate) so many layers so little nap time(2 yr olds arent helpful when learning php).

I understand your reasons for not wanting to release the theme however take a look at it from the other side for a moment, to New Drupal Adopters and those who cant do php(yet) showing off these terrific themes while not having quite the same caliber of theme availible can be discouraging and may cause people to drift to other products that have more readily accessible themes. After all if they have to work hard to make their drupal site different than any other then they may not bother. To a new users this may seem somewhat elitest(sp).

Just trying to share my point.

I agree. It is easier to make

drumm

he/him

NY, US

commented 19 October 2004 at 03:37

I agree. It is easier to make a theme with a brand in mind. The brand won't be as strong if there are a bunch of other sites out there that look the same. If you look through http://drupal.org/sites those are mostly bluemarine.

A good set of default themes for distribution is a harder task because they have to be more resistant to different configurations and content that may be placed in them and be brandless. The theme garden is a good step at encouraging this.

Background problem in IE6

sofiya commented 19 October 2004 at 01:27

.. background does not render correctly in IE6 for the comments blocks. It's ok in FireFox though.

"If you build it, they will come." -- Field of Dreams

Fixed

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 12:53

I hope I fixed the problem...for some reason IE6 was not clearing the outermost column. Explicitly setting width: 100% on the clearing footer fixed it.

This theme has been a very annoying game of "avoid the IE bugs" ;).

two annoying IE bugs

TDobes commented 21 October 2004 at 17:15

Steven,

I've been enjoying the great new theme with Firefox at home over the past few days, but today I loaded it up with IE in a lab and found a couple bugs:

FOUC - copy/paste the code which fixes this in bluemarine should fix this quickly
cannot highlight text in comments - this is a weird bug... IE seems to insist upon highlighting the entire comment rather than particular text within it... very annoying

As much as I despise IE, it might be worth looking into fixing these things to ensure a good "first impression" to those considering using Drupal.

IE highlighting

Steven commented 21 October 2004 at 18:14

The highlighting problem stems from the repeated usage of position: relative; to get the round corners working. It's unlikely that I'll be able to fix this.

I'll fix the FOUC.

Excellent work

kbahey commented 19 October 2004 at 03:44

Well, I have been dreaming of a good Drupal theme, like I mentioned here when SpreadFireFox was discussed http://drupal.org/node/10836

This current theme is exactly what was needed.

Great work Steven! Now we are in the big leagues in the looks department. Drupal was always better in functionality but lagged in the aesthetics.

My only comment is that the font is a bit fuzzy or jaggety. Can you change it to something less jaggety?

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

Font fuzzyness

i100yanov commented 19 October 2004 at 05:30

Under Linux with XFT everything looks absolutely flawless;) Under Windows you should somehow enable "subpixel rendering" (there should be such a function, I think) to smoothen the fonts. Any other font would be less readable on a computer screen, since Tahoma (or Verdana?) was specially designed for such a digital deployment.

Overall great, but fonts are pixelated

bradnickel commented 20 October 2004 at 22:53

Running Mozilla Firebird 1.0 on Windows XP and getting pixelated "fuzzy" font. Overall look is great but font makes next too impossible to read.

Brad Nickel
Web Marketing Services
http://www.clickbrain.com
brad@bradnickel.com
877-243-0405

Hinted anti-aliasing

Steven commented 21 October 2004 at 00:51

This is because I use the Bitstream Vera Sans font. This font is designed to anti-alias at small sizes using special hints. On LCD screens and good monitors, this should look much better than non-anti-aliased fonts. If your resolution is set too high (or you have a bad monitor/videocard), then blurring will make the text harder to read.

Try turning off font smoothing in Windows, or if you have a laptop/LCD, turn on 'ClearType' or use text resizing to make the font larger. Alternatively, you could just remove the Bitstream Vera font: in that case, Verdana will be used instead. Verdana is a close cousin of Vera, but does not have the low-size anti-aliasing. It sounds like Vera doesn't look good on your system anyway.

In the meantime, the rest of us will enjoy the anti-aliased, hinted glyphs.

Hmmm.... Not a very user friendly position for visitors

bradnickel commented 22 October 2004 at 20:33

I can understand your reason why, but frankly do not believe that is the proper choice for a system that wants to encourage new users. Why should I have to change my Windows config to be able to read about Drupal and choose whether I want to use it?

I am on a Sony Vaio laptop and this is the only site where I have this problem. Because I am an avid user of Drupal, I guess I will reluctantly adapt, but I am trying to diplomatically say, that I think this is a bad user interface choice and do nto believe that this should be the attitude of this community.

Font choice

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 21:21

It sounds like it could be a problem with your display gamma: LCD displays are notorious for having their gamma set too high, which would wash out anti-aliasing.

Bitstream Vera Sans is used as the first choice font because it is a higher quality font, it is free and Free, and it is available on every Gnome environment. The second choice font is Verdana, which works for all Windows PC's.

I appreciate the help, but does not address my concerns

bradnickel commented 22 October 2004 at 23:02

those are that if others have this problem(and it seems likely others have and will), then this is not a smart user interface choice. Sorry to pound this point, but I have real concerns about these kinds of things.

LCD laptops using MS Windows

sepeck commented 22 October 2004 at 23:12

LCD laptops using MS Windows XP will want to make sure that they have Clear Type enabled.

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/cleartype/tuner/1.htm

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Yes, it is a laptop

kbahey commented 23 October 2004 at 05:11

Yes, I am using a laptop with an active TFT LCD display set to 1024x768.

The fuzziness goes away a bit when I change the size in FireFox to a larger one.

The point others made about requiring the user to tweek the system is a valid one. One should not have to do so. Perhaps dropping down to Verdana would make it reasonable for all, and a little less eye candy (antialiasing).

Just by 2 cents.

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

Thank you

bradnickel commented 23 October 2004 at 12:54

Thanks. I thought I was going crazy for a minute there and the point I was making just was not getting through. Glad someone else can see it.

Anti-aliasing

Steven commented 23 October 2004 at 13:32

If you're having problems with 'fuzzy text' on a laptop tft then your configuration is definitely wrong. LCD's enable the use of subpixel rendering for letters (called 'ClearType' on Windows) which triples the horizontal resolution.

Find the option, and enable it. Your eyes will thank you for it.

OK, I give up this is my last try

bradnickel commented 25 October 2004 at 05:11

You said this is a common laptop problem and sounds like common on other PCs. This is a bad usability choice for this community. No other site I have ever visited has this problem. No one should have to change their config to view this site or any site. That is the idea behind usability.

By the way, I implemented the change and did not improve. I am not going to change my entire browsing experience by increasing the font size in my browser for this one site.

If Drupal does not want to be inclusive and think about these types of issues, then let me know, but I thought the goal was to increase the size of the user community. Your design is great, but you need to get over the idea that somehow everyone needs to adjust to your choice of fonts in order to use the site.

I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I will not bring this up again, but it is not a good sign for the future of this product, if this attitude carries across to development.

Screenshot?

Steven commented 25 October 2004 at 08:52

No, really, I don't understand. Linux with Freetype, Mac OS X, Windows XP with ClearType, they all have anti-aliased glyphs. If this was a bad thing, then why did years of development and font design go into hinting and anti-aliasing technology?

No-one else seems to have a problem with it. In fact, the main criticism that Apple users have about non-cleartype Windows is that the fonts look like ants crawling across the screen. Ever since I've discovered that Bitstream Vera anti-aliases at low point sizes and manages to look damn sexy while doing so, I've started using it for programming, reading and generic UI text.

Please, send me a screenshot to steven -at- acko -dot- net. Preferably 24-bit PNG (not JPEG, that's lossless). I'm dying to know what these unreadable, fuzzy letters look like.

Better yet post them to a web

CodeMonkeyX commented 25 October 2004 at 16:14

Better yet post them to a website and give us a link. I would like to see too.

Because the site looks fine on the multiple systems I have viewed it on.

I as well, I had a friend usi

sepeck commented 25 October 2004 at 17:22

I as well, I had a friend using OSX check from his system. I used my linux system at home. Several different XP systems from laptop LCD, desktop LCD screens and different CRT screens from work and home and they all looked fine.

-sp

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

You are missing the point

bradnickel commented 25 October 2004 at 23:47

If a user has to do anything to their PC in order to view a web site, then it is a bad interface choice - period. No one should have to install anything to view a web site.

You have 7 seconds to get and keep a visitors attention. Unless you have a way to make changes to their system in 7 seconds without them doing anything, then they are gone and your chance to tell them Drupal is the best CMS on the planet is lost forever.

I have posted screen prints here:
http://www.clickbrain.com/images/drupalscreen.png
http://www.clickbrain.com/images/drupalscreen2.png

Thanks,
Brad

Well it would seem you are ha

CodeMonkeyX commented 26 October 2004 at 07:12

Well it would seem you are having trouble with your system fonts, and your webserver. The images are not there.

Try again

bradnickel commented 26 October 2004 at 19:50

You hit it in the middle of a server upgrade reboot adn backup.

Brad

Rare cases

Steven commented 26 October 2004 at 12:05

I'm not missing your point. I just don't agree with you.

a) (looking at screenshot) I know this bug. It's Windows-only. It occurs in some cases when drawing text to a Memory Device Context, without Cleartype, where the gamma for the anti-aliasing is calculated too highly. I've seen it pop up when doing some Windows/OpenGL programming. I'm not sure if it's driver/hardware specific or not, but it's not happening on my (Windows) box:
http://acko.net/dumpx/vera.png

b) It only occurs on Windows platforms /with/ the Bitstream Vera font installed. Given that Vera was donated to the Gnome community by Bitstream, the only Windows machines that have Vera are those that it was explicitly installed on by the user. This is a tiny, tiny fraction of the users. If the font looks like crap on your computer, remove it. Verdana will be used instead, which looks nearly identical (same font designer, also designed for screen display, similar letter shapes, just Vera takes the technical aspects even further) but does not have the anti-aliasing.

I'm not going to switch the font preference around from Vera -> Verdana to Verdana -> Vera: Vera is a higher quality font, and many Linux / Mac machines have both installed. In that case, I want them to see Vera.

Browser bugs I will handle. Misconfigured and/or buggy display drivers not, especially when only a tiny fraction of the visitors will suffer from it. Text display is the most important function of the graphics layer: if it's broken, fix it or work around it. I'm not telling every visitor who comes here, I'm telling the 3 people so far who have reported this problem.

PS: "No one should have to install anything to view a web site." Ask Macromedia about the number of Flash installations.

Last post in this thread from me.

not all necessarily true, Steven

cel4145 commented 26 October 2004 at 17:02

1) When in doubt, go to the oracle :) I queried fonts@gnome.org. It seems that this is not a display driver bug, but rather actually normal behavior since Bitstream Vera is designed to work with anti-aliasing more so than standard Windows fonts, and really is optimized for FreeType. So unless ClearType is configured (it's not the default, is it?), we can expect that other Windows users may have the same experience.

2) Windows users may not explicitly being installing Bitstream Vera, but instead unknowingly. Vera has been included with OpenOffice since version 1.1. We should consider that many people using Drupal, or interested in Drupal, are likely to be using or have tried OpenOffice more so than the average visitor to other websites (there will be a higher concentration of open source advocates here).

Clear Type is designed to imp

sepeck commented 26 October 2004 at 20:03

Clear Type is designed to improve the display of LCD monitors (laptops). It will make minpr changes to a CRT display that are subtle but really do help. A standard default Windows XP install do not haev Clear Type enabled. Laptops that use a HW vender supplied distribution generally have it on to improve the products usability.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

What a close minded attitude.

bradnickel commented 26 October 2004 at 19:38

You may get my point, but you are not addressing it.

I am an Open Office user (see post below). How many installs of Open Office are there? Whether it is .2%, 1% or 10% of your visitors, making them do anything but immediately learn about your products is a bad choice.

What is the goal of this web site? To promote Drupal? To get developers involved? To get donations?

"I'm not telling every visitor who comes here, I'm telling the 3 people so far who have reported this problem."

Really? How many folks have left the site because they could not read it or didn't want to end up with a headache? Do you think new users are going to bother to post here to tell you or are they going to move on to another CMS? No, they are going to say "I could never use that with my client" or whatever their needs and try something else. What if one of those visitors was a potential corporate sponsor? Can you get in touch with them and tell them to make changes to their system and please come back and try Drupal? What if I sent the rather large new potential client I have that needs 3 sites redone to read more about Drupal and they had this problem? Should I run over to their office and see if I can change their system for them and hope they still want to do business with me?

"Ask Macromedia about the number of Flash installations."
Any web site that requires Flash or any kind of installation or system change is a poor user interface choice. On the whole, Flash is a poor choice anyway. Even Macromedia is smart enough to not require me to have Flash in order to read about their products. Notice all that html on their product pages?

Your attitude about this says to me you care more about protecting the sanctity of your design and font choice than promoting Drupal and addressing the site's goals.

You have never countered the basics of interface and browsing habits. Why not do what is best for the community? Sorry to be so beligerent about this, but I am amazed that in a community that has always been so helpful to me and open to ideas, that you would take this closed-minded point of view.

We have heard from a couple of folks on this. Would anyone else like to chime in? Am I off base? Did I miss the goals? Am I wrong about interface and usability and making system changes in order to view a site? Is this the attitude of the Drupal team as a whole and I should stop doing installs of Drupal now and move on to another product and learn all over again. This may not seem to be a big deal to many of you, but this is a philosophical issue for me and Drupal has a number of usability needs as it is that have been discussed here a great deal. I am basing my business on this product and can't take the chance.

Brad

Sure, I'll chime in.

wgiese commented 15 November 2005 at 17:53

Sure, I'll chime in.

The fonts look terrible on four of the PC's/laptops I use - different video hardware on each, two are Win2K, two are XP. All have LCD displays. The only other common denominator - OpenOffice 2.0 on each, which from a brief reading above, seems to install the Bitstream font in question.

The site looks fine, in all browsers, in a relatively recent SuSE install. Since the SuSE install is a dual-boot config on one of the above Windows PC's, the fuzziness is not a hardware issue.

I temporarily forced Firefox to use my specified fonts - the Verdana font shipped with Windows looks fine here.

Brad - you are not off base. It's simply retarded for somebody to suggest I adjust Windows/font settings to properly view any web site - it's not necessary anywhere else I go.

I'm not even going to attempt the changes suggested...the site designer now knows the text looks terrible to a large number of their users. If they don't want to change things, so be it.

As should be obvious, for every person who searches here to find out why things look bad, there are probably 1000 more who don't bother, but just say "man...that looks like crap."

Excuse double post.

bradnickel commented 26 October 2004 at 19:39

Connection running slow today. This was a double post.

not just laptops

cel4145 commented 25 October 2004 at 05:47

I'm experiencing the fuzzy text problem intermittantly with a Viewsonic 17" LCD and an ASUS Geforce FX 5700 on an XP machine. Not a substandard monitor or video card. Sometimes, the text blurs and fades.

And as suggested elsewhere, I have tried configuring ClearType instead of the standard font smoothing. Makes the text awful in some other applications (such as Thunderbird), and honestly, starts to give me a headache after a few minutes.

I can live with it the way it is now without ClearType. Nevertheless, I'm for not for having the user tweak their display to read drupal.org, especially since in my case, it doesn't seem to help. A consistent user experience would make more sense, IMHO.

Outstanding

i100yanov commented 19 October 2004 at 05:22

Extreme elegance splashes from the new Drupal homepage!!!

Fantastic work!!!

Good luck!

The long wait...

sicario commented 19 October 2004 at 07:22

Congratulations for changes!

When i read about this in Photomatt was nearly a shock x)
Keep the good working!
BTW, the move to spotlight the "download" and the "feature" section , like moz site, was great.
Regardings

Make-over

Dries commented 19 October 2004 at 08:03

The theme has been ready for several weeks: as you can imagine, it was difficult to keep it a secret, yet we really wanted it to be a surprise. Looks like it worked.

What can I say? Steven effectively turned drupal.org into one of the best designed Drupal sites to date. He is a talented young man. If there was such a thing as Steven Wittens stocks, I'd buy some. He might go IPO one day.

Indeed

Bèr Kessels commented 19 October 2004 at 11:13

Not only did he do a great job on designing a CSS based theme, he also managed teo have it look great! Beleive me, that is a very complex, issue. A designer needs to have feeling for colours, distribution and what else. While CSS requires a great technical knowledge. A combination of both is a rarety. Most of the time you either find CSS savvies aimed at "what all you can achieve with CSS" or designers who do not care how a look is achieved, as long as it is (flash!).
Steven obviously has a good feeling about both, resulting in not only this great Drupal theme , but in many more goodlooking designs.

I think we should set up a shareholders union for Steven Shares :)

Bèr

Right menu block in IE

ahoeben commented 19 October 2004 at 09:20

In IE, when there's a long line in one of the blocks on the right (eg a forum pst about a very_long_function_or_module_name), the whole right column drops to below the content column text.

The same doesn't look too spiffy on firefox either, with content rendering outside the block, but at least it doesn't drop to below the content.

Otherwise, this looks GOOD!

800x600 problem?

rkendall commented 19 October 2004 at 11:30

Really good job on the new design - looks great

Improvement tweaks...
I noted similar problems, which I suspect may be due to smaller window sizes. At 800x600 I find some rendering glitches in both Firefox 0.10 and IE6.

For Firefox, the top tabs squash in so that the 'support' tab drops below the 'contact' tab. Also text padding in the blocks gets a bit too squashed.

IE6 copes better with the tabs across the top, but sends all the blocks to the bottom (after the main content) - as noted above.

Congratulations to Steven and anyone else involved! Job well done.

i have to agree that this is

lazydave21 commented 19 October 2004 at 12:35

i have to agree that this is a stunning improvement on the old design, it now looks very slick, and i'm sure will attract a lot more people to download drupal themselves

also agree with not making this theme freely available. It loosk really bad when so many sites are using the default theme

david
www.justride.co.uk < recently drupalised:)

Tableless designs

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 13:02

Unfortunately tableless designs have to be much more careful about their content. When deciding between tabled or tableless, I bit the bullet and chose the latter. Tableless does have advantages rather than just being a novelty: the main content loads first, the source HTML is smaller, it is more accessible, etc.

I'm still not giving up though... I'm going to look into using soft-hyphens and such for the sidebar. Inserting them automatically through a regexp should be possible. Of course I'm not sure if the browsers respect those.

great theme

ax commented 19 October 2004 at 17:54

and i big surprise - congrats!

you'll definitely have to look into breaking long strings in the sidebar, though. "killes@www.drop.org", who just joined the side, happens to be a string some pixels too long for 1024x768/IE6 and makes all blocks move below the footer. which makes them actually useless. i suffered the same problem on my drupal site and only got rid of it by unconditionally hard breaking all strings longer than than some x chars. to my knowledge, soft-hyphens don't work on any IE :(

with killes not being listed (now), i don't have anything to complain :)

p.s. well, a little one: in IE6, there is no margin between fieldsets in admin forms. should be fixable, shouldn't it?
p.p.s. now "bmann@bmannconsulting.com" joined :(

margin on fieldsets

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 21:22

The margin had to be removed on IE6 because IE doubled them and caused random float drops at certain widths.

What I see on IE5

pamphile commented 19 October 2004 at 17:02

What I see on IE5 - I'm upgrading to IE6 soon.

http://forum.01community.com/drupal_ie5_screenshots/

flaky text http://forum.01community.com/drupal_ie5_screenshots/boxes_pushed_down.jpg

broken boxes http://forum.01community.com/drupal_ie5_screenshots/broken_boxes.jpg

space between forum and top bar http://forum.01community.com/drupal_ie5_screenshots/forum_space.jpg

IE5 untested

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 17:56

I did not test the theme on IE5. Given the amount of CSS magic that goes on, it's not surprising that it looks this bad. I even ran into some Mozilla bugs.

IE5's support for CSS is horrifying compared to any modern browser. IE6 is bad, but is by far the most used browser out there, so you can't ignore it.

A word of advice: if you're going to upgrade your browser, forget about IE6 and try Mozilla Firefox instead. Faster, smaller, better and safer.

better yet

sepeck commented 19 October 2004 at 18:28

upgrade to IE6 to fix security vulnerabiliites that IE fixes on your OS,then use Mozilla Firefox as your primary browser except for Windows Update and other Active X only sites.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Hacks

Robert Castelo commented 19 October 2004 at 18:25

I'm curious, did you use any browser 'hacks' (e.g Box Model)?

If BlueBeach is not going to be released, then I guess you don't need to worry about the "no hacks" restriction that applies to all the core templates, making it easier to fix all these individual browser problems as they come up.

------------------------------------------
Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training

Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
----

IE stuff

Steven commented 19 October 2004 at 19:03

There are tons of IE-only styles in there, using the underscore hack. Also because of frequent appearances of the Peekaboo IE bug in various forms, there are lots of 'useless' styles in there (like position: relative without top/left).

Still, because I ignored IE5/win and mac, the amount of hacks is limited to a couple of style overrides, no big parser-confusion tricks.

Great improvement ... release to everyone!

shane commented 19 October 2004 at 22:27

I like the changes ... definitely a VAST improvement over the ancient dated and horrible looking previous theme (honestly and truly no offense meant towards the previous theme developer).

My hat's off to Steven for such great work. I understand the desire (at some level) to keep it "secret". But, I would ask that the theme be released. I know that ultimately some less than clever webmasters out there will just rip it off and use it as is... But the vast majority of us use themes as a base starting point. I personally have taken several previous themes and mangled and munged them to make my own from it.

The amount of effort and work it takes to build a fully functioned theme from scratch is enormous - particularly for those of us that "just want it to work" without wanting to delve into weeks worth of jumbled documentation on how to make it all go...evaluating existing themes for the arcane magic that makes a nifty feature work ...

I like this new Bluebeach theme, but it ain't a Panacaea for all of us. I would love to use it as a starting point to mangle my own. The closer something is to what we want, the easier it is to mangle. I have yet to find ANY module or theme in Drupal to do exactly as I want it to ... I have over 20 patches that I constantly apply and bring forward to make it work the way I believe it should ... I have given up trying to get patches included, I'm either completely ignored, or my style or ideas fall on deaf ears too often for me to continue trying.

I'd ask that any themes be released to the public for the rest of us to grow and mutate. Afterall, if you look back at the history of the themes in Drupal, I think it's pretty clear that almost every single one of them is a mutation in some form or another of a different theme (be it a Drupal based one, or some other CMS based theme).

The dirth of decent themes for Drupal is a major problem in my opinion. It would be nice if there were a dozen or so GOOD to GREAT themes available for webmasters to choose from.

Thanks for hearing me out.

looks great and one little thing

kc commented 19 October 2004 at 22:50

Looks great. Good job Steve!
One little thing I just noticed. When the number of comments get bigger as in this post, they keep getting indented and move to the right. This makes the navigation column on the right drop down below the content area.

KC

My Sites:
powershotblog.com | adsensed.com | alafranga.com | thelittlebig.com

Yes. I saw the same thing

kbahey commented 20 October 2004 at 02:06

Indeed I saw the same thing. Using FireFox on Windows 2000, the menus on the left hand side are at the bottom after all the comments.

Even as I post this, the menus have been pushed down.

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

Your signature is broken

Steven commented 20 October 2004 at 02:11

That's because there is an open <div> tag in your signature.

Bluebeach theme: please release in the spirit of Open Source!

andremolnar commented 20 October 2004 at 02:12

First off, - The new drupal.org theme is amazing. Looks great - feels great.

Many other have made this comment, but I thought I would add my own $0.02. The bluebeach theme should be made available to developers / designers to serve as a starting point for their own themes.

The graphics and other finer touches need not be included, but a bare bones version of the theme should be made public in the spirit of open source!

I've been wrestling with a tabless theme for my own drupal site and I know the pain that other designers and developers must feel when they embark on their own tabless designs - especially when working within a theme system. (As a side note I intend to release my theme as well - but I'm busy finishing my site content at the moment and the theme isn't 100% ready for the public - business before pleasure you know - but for those wanting a preview of the code http://www.andremolnar.com/mtarchives/000125.html - which applies to http://www.becircle.com [still in beta])

Yes - those that are dedicated can reverse engineer bluebeach - but for those that need a head start, I think it would be plain nice and neighborly of you to release it in some form.

JMHO

andre

No win-win situation, long term vision

Dries commented 20 October 2004 at 05:47

The problem boils down to the following question. What would help the Drupal project most: creating a unique brand for drupal.org (and make drupal.org a Drupal showcase), or making one extra theme available for download (and help theme developers)? What is the number of people that benefit from a better drupal.org, and what is the number of people that benefit from an additional theme?

I believe that - in the long - a unique brand is more important. It can attract designers as well.

+1

rkendall commented 20 October 2004 at 09:11

Well put Dries, no argument really.

If anyone thinks new themes are needed, get working and contribute one.

Gladly, you come watch my 2yr

red_eye commented 20 October 2004 at 16:20

Gladly, you come watch my 2yr old and mow the 1.5 acres of grass. :)

I respect your point Dries. B

red_eye commented 20 October 2004 at 16:31

I respect your point Dries. But keep in mind what a lot of people want in a CMS is flexability (Drupal definately has this) and a way to easily make it look like their own. Bottom line is Drupal is theme deficient when compared to some other products in its class. The reason so many people run the same theme is because they dont have a choice and/or the know how to build one. I intend to eventually try to tackle a theme from the ground up but two things have to happen.

1. The theme engine and code needs to stay stable for a bit. I'm thinking the best way to reach this is I will stay with 4.5 for a while, not that sticking on a version doesnt create its own issues.
2. I need to spend more time with php and the guts of drupal.

Your question about who the theme benfits is a good one and I see it like this.

Do you want to help and encourage new users who dont know a lot about php, css etc to use drupal? or
Would you like to keep drupal to those who know what they are doing and limit those who dont to all looking like a bunch of clones?

Watch your words

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 20 October 2004 at 16:45

I keep reading that Drupal needs to let people easily make it look like their own (as you have written). Releasing a theme is not about helping people make it easier to look their own, but make it easier for people to copy and use the theme. There are existing tableless themes out there, which are at different levels of easing the modification. Look into the chameleon theme in core if you are fluent in CSS to make stlyes, or if you are fluent in PHP to modify the theme. Or do the same with the xtemplate based themes also in core, if you are not familiar with PHP. This theme you see at drupal.org is not any easier to customize and make it look you own.

Changes in 4.5

Steven commented 20 October 2004 at 17:02

The theme changes in 4.5 are not as big for a themer... and I don't think anyone will doubt that they make theming a lot easier now.

Style-only themes allow people to quickly tweak a design for their purposes (logo, colors, font, ...). Templates are now fully grown themes, so people with no PHP knowledge can more easily theme Drupal. And the creation of templating engines like PHPTemplate put lots of power in the hands of a designer without losing the convenience of separate files.

Maybe if I have time I'll make a new theme for core or contrib focused on easy branding... but the problem is that as soon as your theme becomes used a lot, it loses its touch. Bluemarine looked great in the beginning, now it's "just another Drupal site".

Theming IS a lot easier

andremolnar commented 20 October 2004 at 19:50

The new phpTemplate and support for theme engine systems is a fabulous improvement. (And I suppose we should all take our hats off to Adrian for making a lot of it happen). In theory, it shouldn't take long for someone to port virtually any theme from any theme engine (smarty etc) to Drupal given the new way themeing works.

Yes - it makes the life of developers and designers a lot easier.

When working on my own BeCircle theme starting with a tabless design I turned to phpTemplate and took some initial cues from "cleanslate" as it seemed like the most bare bones thing to build on. In the end I actually had to actually ditch 95% of the initial CSS content due to bloat/clutter and re-build it from the bottom up. Still - the simplicity of phpTemplate made the actual design of the style sheets (and thus the site) a breeze.

BUT - it was a "breeze" because I am comfortable with CSS - and I read/write PHP. I could go through the code that Drupal and phpTemplate produces to know what CSS .classes and #id's apply to which elements of the site - and tweak it to my liking.

For the novice/intermediate CSS designer with little or no PHP knowledge I imagine that tackling their own custom theme is still not AS easy as we would all like to think.

That is why it is so important to have a variety of contributed themes to provide a starting point for less experienced developers/designers to "play with" and more experienced developers/designers to "learn from."

What's my point?

I just wanted to give some background on where I was coming from. When I requested the release of BlueBeach (or a variation of it) it wasn't because I need to see it or want to use it. It was really a request to share the knowledge and technical details of the theme - I mean this is an open source project.

Anyone, including myself, could easily reverse engineer the theme and make it public (I'm choosing not to - out of respect to the wishes of dries and the rest of the drupal team), but really nobody should have to do that.

I appreciate not wanting to have a bunch of drupal.org clones out there. I also appreciate the idea of wanting to keep something just for drupal.org to set drupal.org appart. But, open source is about keeping things open - and easily accessible.

So - may I suggest perhaps releasing a version of BlueBeach with a request for users not to use it. Maybe even delay its release for a few months. In the end some may still use it AS IS - but afterall, how much 'cred' are those people going to have? We'll all know where they got the theme from - and some people may even remind them that it's not cool - or whatever. But for those with a genuine interest to learn from the theme and grow as developers and designers - drupal would be providing a real service.

andre

wine...

mrshark commented 21 October 2004 at 13:41

Anyone, including myself, could easily reverse engineer the theme and make it public (I'm choosing not to - out of respect to the wishes of dries and the rest of the drupal team), but really nobody should have to do that.

"wine project" would not even exist, if its authors had thought so...

Reverse Engineered

andremolnar commented 22 October 2004 at 10:14

Not respecting the wishes of gates and balmer is a bit different than not respecting the wishes of dries and steven.

At any rate I have gone ahead and reverse engineered it out of curiosity.

http://www.andremolnar.com/mtarchives/000126.html

andre

sure...

mrshark commented 22 October 2004 at 14:44

you're right... infact something is protected by IP laws and copyright, where something else is protected by wishes :grin:
anyway, respect their position, if i have to reverse engineer a theme, i'll do with that from theme garden ;-)

Starting point

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 20 October 2004 at 07:13

Those who would like to have a starting point tableless theme, you can look into the marvin_2k style for phptemplate. Since Bluebeach is also based on phptemplate, you will get a possibly similar theme (without the graphics of course)

I love it

yrret commented 20 October 2004 at 05:19

I know, another me too, post.

FABULOUS!!!

I don't think you should release the theme.
Make another one perhaps, but don't release this one. (As was said, get the Web Developer Extension for Firefox if you want to see how it works.)

my review

kika commented 20 October 2004 at 13:37

Last, but not least: the theme is big improvement from the old, and nice piece of CSS engineering but there are numerous details that still needs to be smoothen out. Attention to details (and skills to systematically deal with them) are still separating us from the Real Professionals(tm).

Personal note: Steven, I am not yet buying your shares, but watching your design skills grow in last year it's hard to resist it in next year.

Thanks ;)

Steven commented 20 October 2004 at 15:01

Thanks for the detailed analysis (although next time please link to the images instead ;). There's always room for improvement and I agree about most of your comments.

1.x: The image looks quite like a brochure so I figured that was pretty clear what it lead to. Your larger mockup brochure spot is nice, but it would mean that the orange area gets less high, especially with your other suggestions (1.6). Effectively the brochure image would not be much larger. Also, the box fills most of the entire width and getting it to look right on all proportions is tricky. For example, on 1024x768 the brochure image is pretty much centered in the orange area.

3.x/5.x: The whitespace is there to make the mission box stand out more (and also reduce its width a bit). Making it the same width as the main body/columns makes it feel much less like a 'spotlight'.

The biggest issue with the spotlight/mission is giving it enough content without losing focus and without scaring the user away. The little paragraph of flat text seems excessive somehow already. This why I added the brochure line in bold: people who skip over the text see a quick invitation about a brochure. Text with pictures is more interesting than text alone ;).

2.x: The font used is FF Max. I think I understand what you mean about it being 'nervous': the logo stands on top of the divider rather than being part of any of the sections it divides. However, I don't feel it's particularly bad.
I think shifting the "Drupal" text up one pixel (so the bowls don't extend into the white), and changing the 'embossing' from down-right to down will make quite a difference.

4.x: The green hue is used for the sticky alone. I colored it to make the transition from top to bottom a bit smoother: the orange area is very colorful while the bottom is much simpler. Maybe a soft yellow hue would be better for the sticky? Although the yellow would contrast a lot with the blue below it. Silvery gray might work too, although silvery is more a property of shading rather than saturation/hue. It could just look muddy rather than bright. Maybe a subtle gradient could help.

6.x: I never really liked Mozilla's search placement. It just feels odd. The blue area at the top provides a space for the page to 'get started': putting a form there would make it feel too busy, I think. Maybe if I make search box background continue until the right screen edge, it would feel more in place.

7.x: I was aware of the problems with the download box, but it was a real tricky one to get acceptable in the first place. The brightness of the background is just so that neither white nor black provides enough contrast. But then, making the box lighter/darker made it stand out not enough or too much.
I also preferred to pimp the Drupal version, that's why it says "Latest release: Drupal 4.5.0" (the version is read from the project tables in the theme).
The download box is also very much tied to the rest of the mission statement (though I originally considered moving it outside the mission box). With your suggestion of moving the brochure image/link to a box of its own, this might not be a bad idea: Maybe I could then color the download box differently so it doesn't suffer from the link/not link problem. Perhaps the whitespace on the sides of the orange area could then be moved between the center box and the brochure/download box.

8.x: I'm not too unhappy about the sidebar. I think the blocks definitely need a background to separate them from the main content: when reading the handbook, the page can get quite crowded, and the backgrounds help to form a 'gutter' for the main content to be in. Your review focused mostly on the frontpage, but I'm curious what you think about the rest of the site.

I don't think the resemblance to the top tabs is a problem, but I do agree that the titles attract a lot of attention. Maybe if the block backgrounds were connected, forming a single blue area, it would be better? Then you'd lose the hard edge of contrast between dark blue and white.

By the way, if you want to see the theme as it was really intended, get the font Bitstream Vera Sans (it's free & Free). It's like Verdana, but just a tiny bit nicer...

yea

kika commented 20 October 2004 at 15:41

> The whitespace is there to
> make the mission box stand out more

to my eye, it just looked a margin bug. but maybe I am biased.

> I also preferred to pimp the Drupal version,
> that's why it says "Latest release: Drupal 4.5.0"

yes, but version number should not have to be that strong, perhaps put it to separate line and make it more subtle. Does majority of dowloaders really care that much of the three-digit version number? They just want to get the latest stable, no? Isn't the version more important on upgrading -- "do they have them same version what I have or newer"?

> Maybe if I make search box background
> continue until the right screen edge, it would feel more in place.

yes, and make it's left side align with sidebar's left side

> Maybe if the block backgrounds were connected,
> forming a single blue area, it would be better?

good idea, it also reduces the "boxyness" I was concerned

Updated

Steven commented 29 October 2004 at 15:38

I updated the theme with some of your remarks. I tried playing with the sidebar, but neither lighter titles or a continuous blue area looked better...

Nice work I like the new head

CodeMonkeyX commented 30 October 2004 at 00:21

Nice work I like the new header section, the old way looked good too but this is just better. ;)

Where can I download bluebeach theme?

UGlee commented 20 October 2004 at 14:00

It looks really sweet, slick, stylish.....but where can I download it and is it compatible with 4.5 release or can it just be used with cvs version?

Please read the article

Steven commented 20 October 2004 at 14:09

Bluebeach is not available for download.

That sucks but OK, it's for d

rjpa commented 20 October 2004 at 16:56

That sucks but OK, it's for drupal, so one great theme guys!

phptemplate.engine

harald.walker commented 20 October 2004 at 21:45

You refer in your post to the CVS phptemplate.engine (http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/contributions/theme-engines/phptemplate/), which does not contain any instructions.

I also tried the PHP Template from http://drupal.org/node/6709 but this one dates back to 14/04/2004 and is not really ready for 4.5.

I do not want to copy the new theme either but learn from it. Mostly learn how you used the phptemplate.engine. At least the Drupal 4.5 release should include one theme, which also uses the phptemplate.engine, since this is being uses as the showcase of the Drupal site itself.

PHPtemplate not in release

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 20 October 2004 at 22:11

PHPtemplate is not in the 4.5 package. The code is there, where you pointed to. Look into http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/contributions/theme-styles/phptemplate for examples of phptemplate usage.

Theme documentation

Steven commented 20 October 2004 at 22:31

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be any documentation on PHPTemplate: I cursed this myself when I made the theme. I've been updating the Theme developer's guide today, and I'm going to start a PHPTemplate theming guide.

Edit: There was indeed PHPTemplate documentation on Bryght's wiki. D'oh! I moved it to the Theme Dev Guide in the handbook.

Great!

rkendall commented 20 October 2004 at 22:58

That would be a real service!

I have been using PHPTemplate, and would really apreciate better docs, especially for 4.5 changes.

Cheers,
Ross.

I wrote a fair amount of docs

adrian commented 21 October 2004 at 19:11

I wrote a fair amount of docs on our public wiki , but the docs have mostly migrated to the drupal.org theme guide.

--
The future is so Bryght, I have to wear shades.

Thanx

harald.walker commented 21 October 2004 at 06:17

Thanx a lot Steven. That's all I was hoping for.

Update: You did a fine job. This helps a lot. I am looking forward to working on my first templates next weekend.

Drupal Theme Community

Yasha@spreadfirefox.com commented 20 October 2004 at 20:56

Why not launch a drupal theme development community using drupal as the site engine? It could be added to the tabs at the top.

I don't know if anything like that already exists, but it seems like an obvious idea and it would work best if it was integrated directly into the main drupal site.

Its under development

adrinux commented 20 October 2004 at 21:33

Yes, it is a good idea and it's being worked on, give it some time.

adrinux
adrinux@ntlworld.com

Adrian Simmons
adrinux@anaath.at

Stupendous

annie-1 commented 20 October 2004 at 22:48

Great job, everyone!! This make over is a HUGE improvement!! Congratulations on all your hard work!!

Annie

wow

luigi@drupal.org commented 21 October 2004 at 12:49

luigi.fridini AT gmail DOT com

I can only say: wow

A proposal and question

bryan kennedy commented 21 October 2004 at 22:42

It seems to me there is a real demand for a bunch of new themes that look as hot as this one, but that aren't the drupal.org theme. So...I guess I will get working on that and if anyone else wants to go for it, please dig in. But I agree that this theme shouldn't be public.

Hey Steven, how long from start to finish would you say it took you to come up with this theme. Just to give folks an idea of what they are up against.

Hard to say

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 05:44

Making the first design mockup took me about an evening... converting it to a PHPTemplate about 4-5 evenings. But then there were still lots of details to sort out (table row coloring, blockquotes, ...).

Those rounded corners

azium commented 22 October 2004 at 10:44

Bryan - yes I agree the the drupal.org theme should not be kept for this site only, but I'd love to some how have the rounded corners on my blocks and comment boxes. I'm stuck with the "out-of-the-box" themes, as my coding skills are limited to changing the odd css colour here and there. So I'd definitely be interested in a public theme that's even half as hot as this one.

tony
--
http://azium.com

Rounded corners

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 14:54

The rounded corners require images... if you want to change their color, you need an image editing program. And to look nice, they need to be anti-aliased too.

I used the following technique for most of them:

- Make the base div be a regular rectangular border of the right color.
- Create 4 images containing the rounded corner in each of the 4 positions.
- Make 4 wrapper divs inside the base div. Give each one of the images as background-image and position them in the right corner, with no repeating (elementary CSS).
- Now the images will look like crap because they are positioned inside the rectangular border.
- To fix this, I set position: relative; on each of the wrapper divs, and set top and left to +/- 1 pixel increments so they cover the rectangular border.

Using this technique also triggers various incarnations of the IE Peekaboo Bug. Each was fixed by setting position: relative; on both the affected block and the block which contained it.

teach a man to fish...

gordon commented 22 October 2004 at 13:27

I know that alot of people have expressed alot of interest in getting the new drupal.org theme for themselfs. The primary representation is to learn, but we all know that the temptation to just use this theme will be too great, and all of a sudden we will have lots of drupal.org's around.
Steven has done a wonderful job with the new and much improved drupal.org look, and frankley I agree 100% with Dries in that we do not want alot of other sites looking like drupal.org. It just brings drupal down, and make it look like every other site. We know what the old xtemplate theme did, Just about every second drupal site used it.
As there is so much interest in this theme, what I would propose is that we turn this into a phptemplate/css tutorial that will help people develop their own themes as good as or even better than the drupal.org theme.
This would mean not giving away the theme but helping people by breaking down the theme and explaining what all of the css does, and how it this relates to the creating a theme using the phptemplate engine.
I am not just blowing smoke here, and would actually like to help create such a tutorial. My ulterior motive here would be that I will hopefully improve my css skills and also help to raise the standard of drupal sites that are around.

--
Gordon Heydon

Great idea! but the timing is off :(

carlmcdade commented 22 October 2004 at 13:45

Since there has not been a final, downloadble, fully working, non CVS version of phptemplate available for 4.5 and PHP5 compatible this will have to wait. Unless you want to also explain to raw PHP newbies how to fix the present phptemeplate to suit :)
---------------------------
info for Drupal installation
__________________________
Carl McDade
Information Technology Consult
Team Macromedia
www.heroforhire.net

CVS = 4.5 at the moment

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 14:56

The CVS version of PHPTemplate works on 4.5. We use it on Drupal.org.

Heehee does not fit all the criteria for non programmers

carlmcdade commented 22 October 2004 at 20:51

Dealing with CVS and PHP5 will be enough to discourage most. CVS requires that you be willing to spend more than 15 minutes trying to get it to work. In most case there is no one to turn to because very few try CVS. This goes back to what was said by Veen in another thread. It's very hard to offer something that's better if one of the requirements is work. Not to mention propeller head type work.

Now you'll have to excuse me while I wind up my propeller and try to get phptemplate to work on PHP5 again ;)
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PHP5?

Steven commented 22 October 2004 at 21:25

Who said anything about PHP5? Drupal is not PHP5 compatible anyhow.

The reason PHPTemplate is not available as a downloadable package is because we're still sorting out themes, theme engines and theme styles in a way that doesn't confuse the heck out of everyone.

Some patience might help.

You need to prepare for PHP 4.x.x

carlmcdade commented 23 October 2004 at 07:59

The point releases for PHP 4 are going to be all bug fixes from now on. Those bug fixes are things that will make the transistion from PHP4 to PHP5 seamless. This is the reason for using strict in PHP5 as a default so that those bad habits get caught before you build a large irreversible monster in PHP4. So while you are doing PHPtemplate you need to test it in PHP5 and make it compatible otherwise you may find that using the next version of PHP4 or PHP5 does not work because they are exactly alike.

Like this little bug http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=28879 which is used throughout Drupal code but is not in PHP5 and has been fixed in 4.3.9 and will likely start a lot of forum threads on warnings and errors.

Of course the popularity of Drupal is also in the mix. If you limit it to just PHP4 then popularity will start dropping as more start moving to PHP5. If this is not important the ok. This is the thing about open source if there is a gap left then someone will come along and fill it. Drupal has a very individual niche standing now and can continue to have this place. But it is going to require that over the top thinking and implementation that made windows so popular.
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Just not now

Steven commented 23 October 2004 at 12:45

There are more important priorities now than making Drupal PHP5 compatible. Given the amount of legacy installations of PHP out there, restricting ourselves to PHP4 for now is not a major concern.

However, if you look at the commits for Drupal 4.5, you'll notice several PHP5-compatibility patches were applied already.

Well like I said you soon won't have a choice.

carlmcdade commented 24 October 2004 at 10:23

This was my point. You should be making it a priority before you have no choice. It's just a simple matter of following the rule on new releases so that there are less bugs with the release of PHP 4.3.9 and 4.4. While you could wait for those release and fix the bugs as they occur, a better discipline would be to code for PHP5 and you don't get those PHP 4 errors. PHP5 is just a picky PHP4 really. You don't have to use PHP5 but just hold to the coding discipline. I don't know how many empty value errors I get from use of automagic variable creation and other "shortcut coding" efforts.

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PHP5 is not just picky PHP4

Steven commented 26 October 2004 at 12:01

- PHP5 always passes objects by reference, PHP4 does not. The syntax for cloning an object in PHP5 does not parse in PHP4.
- PHP5 has a different syntax for object members than PHP4, which is /not/ backwards compatible.

These 2 problems prevent Drupal 4.5 from being PHP5-compatible.

I don't get the rest of your post. What, you think we're going to add in more bugs on purpose?? Sorry to say this, but your posts lately seem to have low content and high bitch factors.

carlmcdade commented 26 October 2004 at 22:11

You're not forced to use PHP5, just let it work

carlmcdade commented 26 October 2004 at 22:15

- PHP5 always passes objects by reference, PHP4 does not. 

The syntax for cloning an object in PHP5 does not parse in PHP4.

- PHP5 has a different syntax for object members than PHP4, which is /not/ backwards compatible.

Right but it does not matter since you are making it compatible and not using PHP5 syntax and writting it in PHP which are different things.

These 2 problems prevent Drupal 4.5 from being PHP5-compatible.

Compatiblity means error less and working not rebuild to a new spec.

I don't get the rest of your post. What, you think we're going to add in more bugs on purpose?? Sorry to say this, but your posts lately seem to have low content and high bitch factors.

Say, you don't understand but keep the vernacular to yourself please. Regardless of how aggressive my posting may seem you will never see me go on the attack personally. I would appreciate the same.


$block->node = $variable;

is an automagic that produces a error of trying to create an object of an empty value. There are a couple of others like this that cause errors. Like not explicitly setting an array container which causes a missing array in some functions of PHP5 because it is not lenient.

There was a couple of coders here that set me straight on this because they said that I was trying to lift Drupal up to PHP5 level rather than making it work. So after taking a couple tips i was able to get Drupal to work fine on PHP5. But there are still some coding conventions that need to be watched for because they will cause problems with future php4 versions.

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Last post

Steven commented 30 October 2004 at 12:14

Okay, last post in this thread. I have better things to do and all you seem to do is discuss and talk without any clear point.

Example of PHP5 problem:
When previewing a node, the module modifies the body/teaser values in the $node object and puts the HTML output there. Then nodeapi modules can modify it further before displaying.

Below the preview, the node form is displayed. In PHP4, no problems occur. In PHP5, because the $node object is always passed by reference, the changes that were made in previewing apply to this $node object as well, and they appear in the form as well.

We cannot simply call clone in there somewhere, because then it would break on PHP4. Hence, a PHP5-only bug which cannot be fixed without breaking PHP4, or without doing some very ugly tricks with eval().

Definitely a good idea

sly_ece commented 28 October 2004 at 04:27

A tutorial on the css used to implement this new theme would be a goer, someone is sure to rip this theme off sooner or later anyway and everyone will have access to it. Why not do a tutorial so people can design their own colors and box boarders etc without having all this discussion (now 125 threads).

It is right to say, if you teach a man to fish he will never be hungry, and he will stay out of your garbage bin at night and stop keeping you wondering what he is going to steal next?

Sly

Newcomer about Drupal

tostinni commented 25 October 2004 at 18:26

Hi,
Well, I'm pretty lucky, just decided to switch to drupal and 4.5 is out.
While I'm still playing with modules and settings, I just have 2 wishes (for the moment) :
- what about a forum with just a little more functions like email warning for replies on topics, it's quite hard to follow up your posts...
- node_perm_byrole is fine, but a nodeperm_taxonomy shoud be better to allow roles to see or not categories (the only allow ACL to ONE vocabulary so you can't deploy ACL on your whole site (or I'm missing something :-? ) )

Thanks for your great CMS, I enjoy the very light code (a few files compare to thousands in other CMS...) I hope I can dig into the code soon and make my own features.

Other modules

Steven commented 26 October 2004 at 00:25

Unlike e.g. integrated solutions like phpBB, Drupal's forum is only a messageboard. If you want email notifications, private messages, bbcode, etc, these call all be achieved with contributed modules (notify, privmsg, bbcode, ...).
Install and enable the module and the feature will be available.

sure

tostinni commented 26 October 2004 at 17:04

But, I think that Drupal's forum with at least email notifications and PM should be more efficient, it's a little bit difficult to follow every thread you post in, and to contact on contributer....

So install modules

Gábor Hojtsy

he/him

Hungarian

Hungary

commented 27 October 2004 at 07:31

So, then install the contrib modules needed for that. You think it would be better this way, others think differently. You have the choice. You can install the extension modules, so your Drupal has PM and email notification.

Hi Goba

tostinni commented 4 November 2004 at 00:28

I mean this for drupal.org, I saw these modules, but I was just thinking that it lacks on drupal.org
Everyone can think what he wants, I just put my comment that I thought it should be useful....

Tab based user interface - not really

gatezone commented 26 October 2004 at 18:35

4.5 is great, the face lift here at drupal.org is wonderful and a great improvement.

I too would like to see a starter set with a theme like "Blue beach" as it is clear from the various posts here that the documentation and readiness of phptemplate for primetime less-than-code-jocky use is challenged.

I particularly think it is misleanding when the benefits and new features of 4.5 say: "Tab based user interface" and show Bluebeach in the background. The really accurate description might be administrative tab-based interface. Most of Drupal (out of the box) is *not* a tab-based user interface. You won't see those nice tabs across the top of most default themes (if any), and most of what an non-privilaged user will see is not tab-based.

My other dream is that in some future revision we 'abstract' the Pokemon Drupal logo ;-) or maype it is a renegade Neopet? Hey I've been using this great Drupal system for over a year and I have bitten my tongue till it's bloody. I know there is great affection, or is that affectation for the little guy. GZ

Tab-based

Steven commented 28 October 2004 at 08:55

Tab based does not refer to the links at the top, but to the local tasks that are performed through tabs.

Examples are my account when logged in, editing a node, tracking posts, etc. They appear in all default themes.

Tab-based user interface navigation: not

gatezone commented 5 November 2004 at 20:52

To coin an expression of Dries, "obviously." But when a person is evaluating CMS systems and they land at Drupal and see the nice theme with prominent navigation tabs and read "tab-based" it is not so obvious to them. Holding out the tab-based navigation on the system's home site and calling it a tab-based user interface is misleading. I'm sure it is unintentional. Explaining that there *are* tabs in the interface, just *not* in the critically major area of navigation doesn't address the situation, particularly when adding tab-based navigation is *not* a trivial task for most of us.

This takes nothing away from the *terrific* looking design and theme which I think is a huge improvement.

[The other emerging issue is peformance. If hot theming drags down performance too much at *relatively* high traffic levels it seems we'd need to back off the theme till it's balanced by resources or additional optimizing of the theme itself.]

broken frontpage

ax commented 30 October 2004 at 19:25

at 1024x768, with the windows taskbar at the right side of the screen, i see drupal.org like that in IE6:

can this please be fixed? thanks!

Nasty browser

Steven commented 30 October 2004 at 22:52

IE is annoying to get right. I can't make the box fluid because it would squish the text and throw the 3 column layout below into float drop hell.

At 1024 it should look okay, but your vertical taskbar makes the horizontal space too small. Consider using a real browser in the meantime...

i hope

ax commented 31 October 2004 at 11:16

that by "in the meantime" you mean that some day i'll see a working frontpage even in my "nasty browser". because i won't switch to a "real browser" (which i do use sometimes, just not as my preferred browser - for some reasons) just to get a proper drupal.org frontpage. that frontpage should look good in the browser used by 75% + of the people, regardless of how nasty that browser is.

i was to write some more along these lines, when i just did a reload of drupal.org in another tab and see that it magically looks just perfectly - even in my nasty browser ;). chapeau! - thats certainly the best answer to my naggings.

You're contributing to the downfall of society

Steven commented 31 October 2004 at 12:02

Well not really, but I think about 30-40% of the time that I spent making Bluebeach went into making the darn thing work in IE. The stylesheet is peppered with position: relative; to avoid peekaboo IE bugs, there are a gazillion attributes prefixed with an underscore so they parse only in IE, etc etc.

Comparably, I only encountered one weird Opera problem which was easy to work around, and some minor Mozilla rendering bugs that I managed to hide. Konqueror only had 2 minor details wrong, which I managed to fix just by looking at a screenshot (I don't have Konqueror or Safari here myself).

IE is becoming a dinosaur browser. Its core is not up to snuff, it freaks out on perfectly valid XHTML/CSS and it doesn't implement essential parts of the specifications...

... because i won't switch ...

i100yanov commented 1 November 2004 at 06:52

... because i won't switch to a "real browser" ...

If you decide not to use the right tool for a certain task, *please* do not complain when you fail!

Cheers!!!

I use conditionals as a standard.

carlmcdade commented 31 October 2004 at 13:05

I never even consider a tabless or CSS only design without first deciding how I am going to get IE conditionals into it. I also use some of the more stabil elements of the IE/ project:

http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/

<!--[if IE]>
<*style>

</*style><![endif]-->

*remove this is used to get around the terrrible filtering of code.
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I understand the high content

gatezone commented 14 November 2004 at 04:50

I understand the high content issue, but I can think of two interesting examples to illustrate what I think may be a fairly serious design issue on the drupal.org site.

One is Yahoo - fairly high content ;-) site - neither the old or the new design allows page elements to literally slide over top of each other. The new yahoo design allows for use of the entire window size better than the old one, but the headers don't 'squeeze' past a certain point if you reduce the size of the browser window. Yahoo is an interesting site to look at in general because of the high content, traffic, and the money they spend on usability and human factors in interface design. I'm not sure where they are going with their new design but interestingly enough it more closely resembles Open Source CMS's than the old design.

Second is the Foxfire site, which is clearly a major influence on the Bluebeach theme. Again if you resize the browser window there is some 'sliding' of elements but not past a specific point and the navigation tabs don't become 'unglued' and stack up over each other as they do with the drupal.org site if you 'squeeze' it past a certain point.

Hopefully the suggestions )in the mail server list) will help with text resizing if it is a critical issue. I think it is less of an issue than the mangling that takes place with browser window resizing now.

I want to encourage you to consider setting a minimum size point past which the elements do not slide over/under each other or start 'stacking' above or below each other. These are not browser or resolution related (I'd love to point at browsers... ;-( ) but pure and simple designer constructs.

A little question

akurashy commented 1 November 2004 at 01:59

If they aren't going to release this can you guys give examples of how to do it?

Here's a good intro for rounded corners and more CSS tweaking

eldarin commented 1 November 2004 at 04:35

An article by _THE_ web-design guru Dan Cederholm:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/mountaintop/ .

There are a lot of other very good articles on CSS'ing and delivering varying styles to different browsers.

Also check out the CSS examples by Tantek Çelik on http://tantek.com/CSS/Examples/ . Especially the Box Model hack is very relevant.

Faux columns is also another great hack by Dan Cederholm: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/ .

More cornering using relative positioning like in Bluebeach: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customcorners2/ .

This should get most of you started on the more esoteric CSS'ing. The A List Apart articles are very good and illustrate examples of the techniques etc.

These two sources explain a lot of how to deal with different browsers and versions of them. So don't be discouraged by the lack of Bluebeach availability. You will be able to understand the Bluebeach CSS and any other a lot better after reading through these resources.

Check out the special on A List Apart for different media-oriented stylesheets as well - i.e handhelds (with 120 pixel display width etc).

* NO-ONE * should be complaining still after these great resources, just study the articles. Some of you should be able to surpass Bluebeach if you put your top effort in there.

Also a little Bluebeach run-through here: http://www.andremolnar.com/ .
(see his comments earlier)

Another nice tip on careful use of CSS classes: http://tantek.com/log/2002/12.html#blog20021216t2238 .

Here's a _very_ basic CSS beginner's tutorial: http://www.hypergurl.com/csstutorial.html - while you get some further guiding here: http://www.htmldog.com/ .

Some more advanced discussion on liquid layouts - avoiding tables: http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2004/09/03/liquid-bleach.html .

Finally, some good CSS discussion forum: http://forums.devshed.com/forumdisplay.php?f=116 .
(and don't miss the Discuss-comments on the A List Apart articles!)

Enjoy.

The post of useful links by E

sepeck commented 1 November 2004 at 16:29

The post of useful links by Eldarin ought to by added to the themei section of the handook. There are a lot of css articles, etc on the web and sorting through them at times is difficult for the neophyte. Also, it should re-inforce that themeing is something that needs to be done by the site admin.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

If anyone is selling high gra

pamphile commented 1 November 2004 at 20:08

If anyone is selling high grade themes, I'm buying.
I'll gladly pay for a theme looking as good as the current drupal theme

Marcel
http://01wholesale.com

Then consider hiring someone

Bèr Kessels commented 1 November 2004 at 22:33

Then consider hiring someone from drupoal.org/services for theming.

Bèr

If you hire someone ...

shane commented 2 November 2004 at 17:45

... It would be nice if you could donate the resulting theme back to the Drupal community!

Fonts look TERRIBLE

phildog commented 2 November 2004 at 14:31

Love the new design with one huge exception. The fonts look terrible on my platform. This is Win2K, latest firefox and latest IE. (Look at your server logs if you question the ubiquity of this configuration)

See screenshots.
http://dodgeit.com/temp/drupal-firefox.gif
http://dodgeit.com/temp/drupal-ie.gif

As the thread above goes into, first impressions are very important. And if I have to configure anything to make the fonts look right the design is severely broken. Follow the lead of the big boys--yahoo, google, ebay, etc. Use simple fonts that look good for EVERYBODY.

Please fix this problem and keep up the great work at drupal.org!

Font smoothing / Anti-aliasing

Steven commented 2 November 2004 at 15:10

Your system is not configured for anti-aliasing font smoothing. Go to control panel > display > effects and turn on the option. This will make fonts look overall better on your entire system.

This option has been available since Win95 Plus!. It is a mystery to me why it is not enabled by default.

This has been discussed higher up. If you've gone through the trouble of installing Bitstream Vera on your system, which is a non-standard font, you should know how to configure your system so it looks good.

The most common configuration, which is a Windows system without Bitstream Vera installed, has no display problems at all, since Verdana is used instead.

asking users to change configuration = broken design

phildog commented 2 November 2004 at 19:00

>Your system is not configured for anti-aliasing font smoothing. Go to control panel > display > effects and turn on the option. This will make fonts look overall better on your entire system.

I tried this and I disagree, they don't look better on my entire system (CRT)

>This has been discussed higher up.

Exactly! Hello! Many people are seeing this problem! And those who care are bitching about it in this forum!

>This has been discussed higher up. If you've gone through the trouble of installing Bitstream Vera on your system, which is a non-standard font, you should know how to configure your system so it looks good.

Well, I didn't explicitly install it myself, so the only answer is some other application installed it for me. And it sounds like it may be a common application.

As someone above pointed out: I visit hundreds of websites every month and this is the only one that is broken! Please, please, fix.

Just installed bitstream vera

carlmcdade commented 13 January 2005 at 14:58

I just installed bitstream vera so that I could change the text in a PDF file. Now I am seeing the worst font aliasing. But only on Drupals bluebeach theme. It look like the font aliasing that caused me to use Opera rather than Mozilla on Linux. Really bad. Font aliasing is on in my WinXP machine and I have tried to change style sheets just for this site but then other things start breaking.
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a DrupalJapan site -- a Bluebeach theme is carried out

p_____n commented 24 November 2004 at 14:51

The DrupalJapan site was made into the Bluebeach theme. Since it created for the DrupalJapan site, he does not plan to exhibit sauce. Please judge to see I may use a Bluebeach theme continuously to a DrualJapan site.

--
DrupalJapan

Round box corners - how?

paulgear commented 13 January 2005 at 13:51

What is the CSS element that causes the box corners to be rounded?

Search please

Steven commented 13 January 2005 at 14:01

For pete's sake, the answer is one this /very/ page, just a bit higher:
http://drupal.org/node/11695#comment-18225

Search first, then ask. No-one's being paid to answer questions here.

Sorry

paulgear commented 13 January 2005 at 21:49

I could have sworn i did a search for "rounded" on this page - must have been "too many tabs open" syndrome. Sorry to bother you...

Bitter

mcsmiley commented 21 January 2005 at 21:51

It's a wonderful theme. I understand the need to keep drupal.org having a distinctive look. However, why not release a theme that is similar? So that drupal users can have sites which look just as good?
--
"I compare [open source vs. non-open source] to science vs. witchcraft." linus

Need time to make it

Steven commented 21 January 2005 at 22:15

Making a good theme takes time. You can't just change a few details here and there as it will still "feel" the same. That's because the familiarity of a site depends largely on small details as you quickly stop noticing bigger features after the first couple of visits.

--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

After reading this whole thread...

Matt Simpson commented 14 February 2005 at 01:20

For me, it's not an issue of time. It's an issue of skill. My background is in the humanities. I don't come from computer science. If I do anything that requires me editing code, it is either 1) a cheap hack, or 2) a configuration based on explicit instructions.

So here I am, researching Drupal and trying to figure out if I can use it for my own personal non-business web site. I've installed various wiki engines and am now using PmWiki. I've installed WordPress. Drupal looks superior. So, I'm thinking that I can probably install Drupal if I dedicate a Saturday afternoon to it.

But before I do that, one of the first things I do is check to see what the web site would or could look like. So I look for the themes...

The best theme I see, after being here and being at Theme Garden, is the BlueBeach theme at Drupal.org. I understand that it is proprietary and respect that.

The second best theme I see has a similar layout, goofy. But I don't like the orange/peach-colored title bars for the boxes. And so, I wonder if I can make a cheap hack of it.

Reading this thread is scary for someone like me. It sounds like there are only a handful of themes. And if I don't see one I like at Theme Garden, and if it's not easy for a guy like me to adjust some things about the theme, then that's just too bad. Correct?

I'm seeing a much more systemic problem here. Drupal themes are not flourishing.

Hmmmm.... maybe I can assemble some theme competitions... maybe I can charge a $$$ entry fee or solicit donation and then route the pot to the winner, like the WordPress Styles Competition. which was organized here.

I guess that it is perfectly natural that after so much development, and such a heavy level of adoption by developer types (i.e. not people like me) that a program like Drupal has not yet developed a set of styles/themes that a person like me can readily use when trying to adopt Drupal.

#103

kbahey commented 14 February 2005 at 02:00

There are plenty of good themes out there. Not all of them are public though.

Check these threads to see some links to outstanding examples

http://drupal.org/node/9227
http://drupal.org/node/7443

Making a good theme is a lot of work, and as you said, it is more art than science. It takes a different mind set from what 'normal' code monkeys do.

Yet, Drupal is infinitely customiable. Whether you start with xtemplate or phptemplate, you can make Drupal look like anything you want, if you know CSS enough, and have a knack for this stuff.

--
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Personal blog: Ba

the point is...

Matt Simpson commented 14 February 2005 at 02:11

Is Drupal only customizable for those who, as you say "know CSS enough, and have a knack for this stuff?"

What about the rest of us? I can barely spell CSS. I don't have a knack for it. We're not supposed to use Drupal because we don't want our web sites to look sub-optimal and there isn't a decent library of public themes?

But... that being said... thanks for the reply ;-)

No, you do what I do. Learn

sepeck commented 14 February 2005 at 02:53

No, you do what I do. Learn AND contribute back.

I didn't know php or css a month ago, still don't really know either but through reading and experimenting with box_grey and others I am figuring out the CSS (http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp) and hope to add another theme soon. If you want more themes then contribute. Everyone will welcome the contributions and expanded pool of avaialble theme's.

Other options are pay someone to build a theme for you.
There are more theme's then at first glance.

There are 11 downloadable in addition to the included 4. Of the downloadable ones, at least 3 have one or more variations available in the download itself. That's 14 on Drupal itself. There are a few more floating about the web from various other site's such as www.lineman.com and civicspace's default theme works too. Sure they get buried in the archives, oh well, it's why we like to keep drupal.org as a central repository for this stuff.

From this thread, http://drupal.org/node/16512 I get http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnegen.altervista.or...

From iChris we get some othe stuff and docs http://ichris.ws/drupal
iChris is also repsonsible for several theme's not previously available and some nice write ups too.

-sp
---------
Test site...always start with a test site.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

That is not what I meant to say

kbahey commented 14 February 2005 at 03:32

What I meant is not what you apparently understood.

Anyone can design a theme. Like almost anyone can draw or write. However writing a REALLY outstanding novel, or drawing a REALLY outstanding painting is something only few can do WELL.

CSS is just the tool, (like the brush, or the pen) and is not particulary hard to use. It does not guarantee that your work be a masterpiece.

It can be tedious to hand edit and optimize though.

Best thing to do is start with a theme you like, and tweak it a bit here and a bit there to see how it pans out. As you get more comfortable, you can write a nice theme for yourself.

More specifically, if you like goofy, then probably you can change it, or something like it (e.g. negen), and change it a bit by bit.

I did it sometime ago, when Drupal was lacking in adequate themes. I only changed the style.css file and achieved OK results (nothing worthy of showing here yet though).

--
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Personal blog: Ba

Changing goofy

Steven commented 14 February 2005 at 03:50

If you want to change Goofy, you'll be sorely disappointed. Almost the entire look of the theme is defined through the images that make up the boxes. It takes skills with an image editing program to change those images.

--
If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

The problem with themes

Steven commented 14 February 2005 at 03:46

The problem with themes is that you cannot share them as easily as code. A theme that is used over and over again becomes boring and repetitive. If you want a unique look for your site, then the best way is to do it yourself or to get someone to design it for you.

The thing is, designing a high-quality Drupal theme is a huge amount of work. It's not just making a nice look, but making sure all the possible pages look as best as possible. In WordPress or MovableType, the only possible pages are a listing of blog entries, and a page showing a single blog entry with comments. That's basically it, and "making a theme" means deciding how those two pages should look.

In Drupal, you have stories, comments, forums, tracker tables, complicated forms, categories, etc. It is simply a lot more work, and many people are not prepared to put that much work in a theme just to give it away to everyone else.

Many people in this thread have asked for Bluebeach to study it and learn from it. I am not convinced of their intentions, as all the knowledge required to make something like Bluebeach is already out there. The handbook describes how to make themes for Drupal with PHPTemplate. There are countless HTML/CSS tutorials out there on sites like Position Is Everything or A List Apart. There are ready-made CSS layouts out there that you can customize and use. Almost all the questions asked about Bluebeach so far are about CSS tricks (like the rounded block corners) that have nothing to do with Drupal specifically. The rounded corners in particular are part of the stylesheet, which anyone can download and learn from already.

That is also why I did not want to share Bluebeach even under a "for learning purposes only"-license: there is very little to learn from the unavailable files, but they are required to use the theme on another site.

--
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I didn't realize

Matt Simpson commented 14 February 2005 at 04:13

I didn't realize that a wordpress theme was much more simple than a drupal theme, and this a drupal theme took much more time to implement.

My intentions are pure and clear. I want to copy themes to use on my own web site. I don't want to study them. I want to use them. I can't write my own. I'm stuck with whatever others want to share.

I doubt that the people going to my site will *ever* go to any other drupal site. And if they did, they woulnd't even know it. My sites are for family, friends, and people who are talking about stuff in my profession (not Drupal folks).

I'm not a developer. Other developers are not likely to see any site I implement. :-)

Your options are

kbahey commented 15 February 2005 at 17:02

From what you said, your options are as follows:

- Use an existing theme. You can see a list of what you can download here http://drupal.org/project/Themes

- Write your own theme (you said you cannot do so, so this one is out)

- Modify a one of the above to your liking (this can be as simple as modifying the style.css to change colors and fonts, or as complex as you want it to be, which is not an option for you)

- Pay someone to write a theme for you that is to your liking and unique to you.

--
Drupal performance tuning and optimization, hosting, development, and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc. and Twitter at: @2bits
Personal blog: Ba

excellent - yes!

Matt Simpson commented 16 February 2005 at 00:45

thank you! this helps me understand what I might be able to do

there might be one more option... host and facilitate a theme contest! :-)

why would anyone enter?

adrinux commented 24 February 2005 at 19:28

And why would anyone enter? You have a nice expensive prize on offer? You may as well just pay someone directly and save all the hassle of running a competition.

You don't have an expensive prize? Creating a good theme is way too much work for people to bother entering, and we already get 'kudos' on the theme garden or just committing to contrib.

adrinux
adrinux@gmail.com

Adrian Simmons
adrinux@anaath.at

$100 prize

Matt Simpson commented 26 February 2005 at 13:26

What if there was a $100 prize to the first-place winner and (obviously) lots of top-of-the-list featuring of the design and the designer?

Why not hire someone? That's easy. To promote development of Drupal themes for everying. Also, I'm not a business. So there's no budget for development. But if is was a good looking theme that I really wanted that someone has for sale for a reasonable price, I'd be interested. Maybe others would too.

not sure

rkendall commented 26 February 2005 at 15:22

Hi Matt,

I can appreciate your position, however a lot of us work as web developers and/or designers, and do not have a lot of time to do extra things like that.

$100 would not even pay for a day's work, and a really good theme is more like a week's work!

Sure, maybe students - and the like - might be interested in doing something like this, for a bit of fun and learning, and a small prize.

Suggesting any competition on drupal.org will not generally go down well, except maybe if you are wanting to compete (instead of benefit).

Have a read of this:
http://drupal.org/node/16189
(example of a person who wants something for nothing)

understood

Matt Simpson commented 26 February 2005 at 16:57

I know what you mean and certainly respect what you are saying. I've been hanging out in systems where people are developing themes/skins, templates, modules, etc. as a hobby activity (usemod wiki, pmwiki, jspwiki, wordpress). And I thought I saw some hobby open-source work going on in Drupal too. I got the idea of a contest from something I saw in the Wordpress community ($60, $80 donations for prizes).

$100 donation isn't chump change to suggest coming from one's own personal pocket as a prize for a open-source contest. I resent the implication that this something for nothing.

contest

Matt Simpson commented 26 February 2005 at 17:51

I just discovered that the idea of a contest is also shared by others here - http://drupal.org/node/17503

Drupal's Theme - Not a Public Theme

cdoctor commented 29 August 2005 at 21:14

So much for open source.

I would like to know how to duplicate Drupal's CSS layout for the main and other areas like Support and Contribute.

Small minded insecurity. Grow up.

Er...

eaton commented 29 August 2005 at 21:56

"So much for open source?"

Er. You seem to be confused about the concept. I can create a Drupal module of my very own, and use it on a site, or sell it, or keep it all to myself, without altering open-source nature of the Drupal Project.

It seems like it would be even more obvious that a UI theme would be private.

I can understand that it's frustrating that one of the best and most polished drupal themes is private. Rather than releasing bluebeach, though, I think creating a wider variety of box_grey CSS templates and distributing out-of-box with the Drupal core would help. One of the biggest problems with prefab CMS and community sites is that they all look alike. As the official community site for the entire project, I'm glad that Drupal doesn't look like Just Another Clone.

--
Eaton — Partner at Autogram

Please do us the favor of

sepeck commented 29 August 2005 at 22:18

Please do us the favor of not belittling people and spamming forum posts in your haste and anger. You seem new to the project and not yet used to it's community.

I replied to you here in your more extensive, well argued, duplicate post.
http://drupal.org/node/23103#comment-51286

For reference, you support question is should more properly be posted as a polite request in the theme developers forum. As it stands, when you do ask, please carefully consider how you are asking your question and if it is done in the best traditions of Open Source.

-sp
---------
Drupal Best Practices Guide - My stuff Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Maybe something like?

livio commented 20 November 2005 at 16:15

Bluebeach is so sweet.
Blue color and corner radius.
May you create some theme looking like Bluebeach, available to free download?

Bluemarine

smallfluffykat commented 20 November 2005 at 17:33

I believe this is why the Bluemarine theme is packaged with Drupal. There are quite a few stock themes on the Themes page. I don't code css or php, so I just use a stock theme on my site but as I understand it, the free themes provided require a masive amount of effort on the developer to get them to be generic enough so that they will work with hundreds of different types of sites that people might want. I don't see that happening any time soon, although if Drupal gets a massive makeover at some point in the future, maybe Bluebeach will also be distributed, after a reasonable amount of time of course for everyone to be used to seeing Drupals new theme and not get confused by seeing the Bluebeach theme somewhere else.

Who knows what may happen in the far future....
;-)