Theme development

Hello to all,

Just recently installed Drupal having taken the plunge to move away from just managing a static site and dispite a number of the common newbie problems following install from local test server to remote serever (host permissions etc.) all seems great except... I have run into the old problem of things don't always work as expeted.

The issue in question relates to a modification I have made to the standard Garland theme. Basically I have just tried to add a banner image to the top of the page and then display the theme un modified below it. The main aspiration was for the banner image to be wide enough that it would work for different screen resolutions but not dictate the width of the page e.g. display it in a container as a background image so it would effectievly auto crop depending on browser window size. To achieve this I modified a copy of style.css and page.tpl.php. In Firefox everything works great in IE7 things not so well at all.

The modifications to the files are below:

style.css (addition of #imagestrip)


#imagestrip {
height:126px;
width:100%;
float:left;
display:inline;
background-repeat:repeat-x;
}

#header-region {
min-height: 1em;
background: #d2e6f3 url(images/bg-navigation.png) repeat-x 50% 100%;
}

#header-region .block {
display: block;
margin: 0 1em;
}

I've been workingwith CMS for several years. One thing that has been consistent has been the theme situation.

Themes have always been a pain and since I'm not a graphics whatzit kinda guy....creating anything truly creative is out of the question.

I tried my hand at themes and moved onto other things. LOL

I can pump out the sites, but I'm always restricted by themes. Restricted, may not be the best choice of words. I should say my choices are pretty well bound by the theme I use for content display.

Recently, I started using Drupal and the Garland Theme. I really like the ability to change the colors so easily. I sure would like to see some additional themes that make use of the color wheel. I prefer color changes in my sites, because they load faster and work well pretty well on any browser or connection speed.

I realize from reading the forums that Drupal has been negatively looked upon for the over simplfied types of themes available. I prefer flexibilty and speed for accessing content on my sites, which Drupal provides. I won't name names, but there are some newer theme additions to Drupal that look a lot more professional.

I look forward to great new themes, but I'd like to encourage theme builders to keep in mind that using color and fewer gifs/png/jpg mean faster sites.

I like this theme but it would be better to have a possibility to set a custom image for every single page or group of pages (in instead of standart picture "top-image.jpg").

I'm a newbie, and would be very grateful if someone could help me to do this.

Theme Winterplain (del)

I'm working on a new theme which I hope both to contribute to Drupal once complete and use as a base theme for some of my own social networking / community sites. My ambition for this theme is that it will be very beautiful, and simple - building on Drupal's strengths rather than forcing Drupal to emulate other CMSs.

With this in mind, I've been doing a bit of work on the display of comments. I'm trying to make comments automatically reference the node or comment they are replying to, so as to remove the need for quoting in many cases. This idea is borrowed from the way that the Facebook forums work. My feeling is that it will improve the usability of Drupal's comments and forums without the need to add all the complexity that other established forums systems use.

However, I've run into problems. For this to work, I'm going to need a way to reference a comment that may be on a seperate page. So - for a comment on page 2 to reference a comment on page 1, it will need to know the exact page that its parent comment is on.

I've set up a working test so you can hopefully understand what I'm on about:

http://gypsy.seedit.co.uk/node/1?page=1

(no laughing at the theme in general, please - it's not yet complete ;) - in fact, it'll probably look horrid in IE)

Hi,

Recently I added the "Akismet module" and have been pleased with it. The only problem is whenever someone goes to add a comment to a piece of content, the status message comes up to say that it will be sent to content moderation, but it says it twice.