Getting Cozy with Drupal

Recent software upgrades on the server here busted the xtemplate themes that I had set up for three domains running CivicSpace. CivicSpace is based on the Drupal content management system, so a perusal of the Drupal themes page led me to the “interlaced” and “argeebee” themes that I’m using as-is at the moment.

I’ve been learning about Drupal themes, though, and I hope to be able to apply that to some of my sites soon. Of course, I’m making use of a lot of good info on the web to get acquainted. Here are some of the sites that I am finding useful:

Drupal.org base documentation for PHPTemplate

Information on “front page” theming with PHPTemplate

Developing separate themes for different website sections

Comment has a method for custom block positioning in 4.6

Nick Lewis’s excellent tutorials on CSS horizontal menus in Drupal

That horizontal menu tutorial, by the way, is a slick piece of work. Retrieving the menu sub-tree from Drupal takes just two lines of PHP code. Making it behave with CSS takes about a dozen lines in a “menu.css” file. While it isn’t quite a “dropdown” type menu in the end, it does have the advantage of not needing any Javascript at all to get things done. As security issues make it more common for people to turn off scripts on untrusted pages, this sort of consideration will become more important.