Theme development

I am reposting this thread in theming to spark some ideas on how should pursue a clients need and to create an amazing theme in my study of CSS. all thoughts are welcome

After a year with Drupal and much growth with how web development is evolving I am leaning on learning more about the CSS that is the back bone of the themes or labels that present the mechanics of our websites. I am using Style Master, Mac Rabbit, Go live, and Photoshop for all my web creation. There is also a book out there called "CSS in Ten Minutes" - that you need to read for about 1000 minutes if you don't understand CSS. The Drupal Theme Garden has had a world of improvement over this growing very quickly year. After dealing with many new clients since my start of representing Drupal. I have discovered what really needs to be to developed in a theme which will make Drupal stand completely in front of the pack as a CMS is a universal theme with an admin area that is more elaborate than the new Garland Theme. I have a new client that has requested a theme that changes background colors with every page so that every node can be published in a unique color scheme - tall order or what!
It's as though the theme should have settings that interact within the publishing of the node -seems possible. As everything depends on the right mind writing the code. But most importantly to show the true strength of a CMS like Drupal you should be able to decide if new nodes can be fluid or Fixed, a choice on how many columns and blocks are going to be set when the node is published, if you want your header or footer to change and resizing of logos as well. It is as though you would have to meld a WYSIWUG editor with what work was done with the Meta Theme and then push that development to yet another level. If you catch my drift this is what my clients are pushing for of how much layout control is desired when publishing any new content. I am also thinking the permissions would have to be set as what type of node designs users would be able to published.

Ok, I have been struggling with how drupal uses CSS styles. I would think it would be a pretty easy process but I am having the hardest time even getting font colors to work correctly. It doesn't help that I can't find a proper guide on all the CSS codes.

I built up my theme using grey_box as a guide.

As an example, I need to make the text color in the sidebar and the content block different. My side bar background is dark grey and the content area is white. So I set the body text to black to take care of the content area

I think I may have made a fatal mistake. I wentn in and changed the theme on our website. I made a bad decision and tried the wire frame theme what a mistake. I can not get into any administrator or anything that was on the left side of the site. How do I get it back to the theme that I had it at.
Please I need assistance!!!
Shelli

I am making the conversion from smarty to phptemplate as smarty really doesn't have any use for me any more. I do like abstracting many things into functions so is there a way to make template helper functions self-aware with phptemplate? In smarty you could add a plugins subfolder in the template folder and then functions would be available in page.tpl, etc if the plugin files were named with a certain convention. Is there an equivalent to this in phptemplate? I try to separate display with programming logic so I like to abstract out common view functions.

Thanks!

Hi,

I try to setup a 5.x site with the new Garland theme. TOP!!!!

I want to change the header style (the whole section with logo, primary links,...). Not only colours but with an image or HTML code.

My questions:
- How can i replace the header style with an horizontal image like on a lot of other sites?
- How can i replace the header style with HTML code (table,...)?

Please tell me about the necessary changes and extensions i must make.

thx in advance

paulap

hello,
I have developed a nice site, by using drupal: http://www.metro-vanlines.com

I am using FireFox, and just after I made it online.
I noticed a wierd BUG...

In IE, every page that has embeded movies (from you tube),
has a full page blank page, and if you scroll the mouse one page down,
you see that the real page exist, but it is just move down from some reason.