My task is to take a run at figuring out theming for Leddy’s new website, hopefully with considerable progress by the end of March. Here are a few as yet incomplete thoughts about what our theme needs to be able to do and considerations for possibly how to do it. Warning, rough notes ahead!
1. Base theme: Zen is widely used; grid960 was suggested by Art and is very useful for creating flexible, multi column designs. Can a base theme be developed that starts with Zen but applies grid960 column widths? Alternatively, there is the NineSixty theme.
2. It seems both Zen and NineSixty expect you to install them as the base theme and use them unmodified, creating sub-themes for all you do. My preference would be to start with some kind of Leddy base theme, so that shared elements would be inherited by our various sub-themes. Question: can a theme be a sub-theme of a sub-theme (a sub-sub-theme)?
3. As the base theme, start with the simple two-column approach that characterizes most of our pages now, and include all blocks that might be used by more than one sub-theme. Information pages (about the library, etc.) would likely use the base theme.
4. Sub-themes would then include
– home page
– search results (probably one big results block unique to this sub-theme)
– subject pages
– blog posts (perhaps base theme would do for these)
– node displays for specialized content types, including: databases (if that’s how they end up being done); promotional items; people (these may not require a sub-theme)
5. Blocks for re-usable elements would include
– search bar
– chat box / askON link
– breadcrumbs
– feeds (News, blogs, others?)
6. Forms. Currently we have a suggestion box and a suggestion for purchase form. Should these (and possibly others) be blocks, or one or more sub-themes? Must investigate forms module.
Hey Peter
You might want to talk to Art about grid960 because we had a hallway chat once about it and he had some concerns about it … not that I can remember exactly what they were.
The 960 frameworks are fantastic for complex columns but the more I burrow into drupal, the more I get the sense that starting with zen is the best approach where possible. If there is content that needs more than 3 columns, or intricate column sizing, I could see switching to 960 in this case.
Answered one of my own questions: sub-themes can have multiple levels of inheritance. As for grid960, I will talk to Art. What I find compelling about it is the ease with which it allows a fairly elegant grid design to be developed. Beyond that, I haven’t gotten very deeply into it yet.
This is going back a bit for me (mostly I worked on Drupal 6) but I found the 960robots theme from Lullabot to be easy to work with ( http://drupal.org/project/ninesixtyrobots ). Subthemes sound easy but there can be cases where the main theme doesn’t easily allow the specific customization you want. Luckily it isn’t conceptually hard to rearrange things if you decide to abandon the subtheme approach, just a matter of moving code around.
Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk was the book that really made me comfortable developing (D6 though).
hth