Adaptivethemes

How to add a Superfish drop menu to Genesis or Adaptivetheme is one of the most common questions I get. Believe when I say I get emails from well intentioned Drupal users on a weekly basis asking me this. So now, please stop emailing me, I relent, heres how its done.

Myself, like many others, have always had an acrimonious relationship with the word “node”. It didn’t exactly get off to a good start when node presented me with a rude “wtf” moment when we first met. Things only went down hill after that, node remaining aloof and abstract, without ever just coming out and telling me what it actually was.

Drupal 6 has seen some truly fantastic installation profiles emerge that allow end users to have a site-in-a-box installation in minutes. UberDrupal gets you up to speed with Uberbcart and OpenPublish is an amazing profile for setting up a magazine or news site.

Each of these profiles has very specific theming requirements. Ubercart has the product and cart pages, while OpenPublish has extended user profiles and bio information for nodes and many additional views and other features.

Quick intro video showing the new Admin User Link menu that appear in the admin section pages by default. There is a new theme setting so you can toggle the display on and off and by default it won’t appear if the Admin Menu module is installed.

This is likely to become a pretty big collection of videos about Scrum and other other Agile based managements processes.

The Semantic Views module for Drupal 6 allows you to easily insert HTML markup for your Views rows and fields.

This is a new module by bangpound and I think this is really going to change how we think about theming Views because for the first time it puts clean semantic Views output in the hands of site builders and other end users, without having to get their hands dirty in the templates.

Prolly one of the most frequently asked drupal design questions to me and others in the Drupal forum is “how do I [insert question] CSS”. Answering these questions provide little more than the proverbial fish, whereas we really want to be teaching them how to fish. Heres a few resources that can really give you a head start with CSS.

Sometimes you want to be able to style menu items individually. For example you may want to use image replacement to display icons instead of the text, or you may want to make one menu item stand out from the rest.

Drupals Primary and Secondary links allow you to do this because they print a class on the li that includes the mlid, so its easy to target a particular link doing something like:

li.menu-123 a {font-weight: bold;}

But, in normal Drupal menus, the ones that appear in blocks, no such classes appear, which leaves them all with the same style.

Genesis supports 3 different layouts including both sidebars on either the left or right of the main content. In this configuration it can be useful to have a sidebar-top region that spans the width of both sidebars, but sits on top of them.

An example of when you might want to do this would be to display a fixed height banner or contextual ads. Its not good for content that will change in height as it could then overflow the div—while the fixed height limitation could be overcome, this tutorial is meant for beginners and is a simple strait forward explanation of how to add new regions in Drupal and how to position the new sidebar-top region using CSS.

This tutorial shows you how to do this in the Genesis starter theme for Drupal 6.

In this video I go over the new layout features in the next generation of Adaptivetheme, code named LayoutSP (SuperPremium). The new layout options are all point-and-click configurations aimed at given end users the abiltiy to modify the layout of their Drupal theme in a meaningful way.

We’re giving away a copy of Smashing magazines new Smashing Book! All you need to do is fill out a short survey and you’re in the draw.

UPDATE: this survey is now closed. The winner was Sean O’Rourke.

In case you hadn’t noticed I really like icons, in fact I love icons. A great set of icons, or even a few nice ones can really lift your Drupal themes from drab, to fab, and all it takes is a bit of leg work to find a suitable set for your rocking Drupal theme. Heres a short list of 5 icon resources I have plundered used recently.

A design brief, sometimes know as the creative brief is a relatively short, high-level document that clearly outlines the important elements of the web design project—whether its a full Drupal theme development project or an ROS banner campaign each project needs this foundation document.

Premium Drupal themes, or Drupal templates as they are sometimes referred to, are themes that are beautifully designed paired with advanced features such as theme settings, color, style and layout options. In this article we explore what makes a theme premium and what you can expect when purchasing Drupal themes.

Just thought I’d mention that we are in fact one year old today and I am so pleased this project has finally started taking shape and is now on the fast track, growing everyday with a group of truly talented designers and Drupal themers. It took us a long time to get here, much thought and planning went into this and 350 odd days of contriving to bring it to reality.

I’d like to glance back at my very first post and I think you’ll see I’ve really stuck to my guns:

In this short tutorial I’m going to show you how to set a unique class on your nodes based on taxonomy terms, which is something I’ve been asked about more than once or twice.

When I first built Gpanels I ran into the usual layout problems when using percentages—IE rounding up, Operas inane percentage rounding behavior and a bunch of other pita issues.

I decided there must be a better way of achieving the layout I was looking for, and not using grids, because my base theme is not grids based.

As promised today we roll out the all new Gpanels - nine in total, five more than the original four released in Genesis. These will be released in AdaptiveTheme RC4 shortly and will be included in the next version of Genesis as well.

We are working on a set of Design Profiles. A Design Profile is a package that includes:

1. A Drupal Installation Profile.
2. PSD templates.
3. A design brief.
4. Design resources such as a logo or other supporting graphics.

The purpose of the Design Profile is to give designers and theme builders a clear development path from design to finished theme. They are not for custom theme builds but rather to help designers design generic themes either to sell or open source.

Cheat sheets, or reference cards, help you remember things quickly and serve as a quick reference when recall is waning, such as during those long endless nights of frantic photoshopping, or is that just me?

Whether you need to learn something quickly or need a quick refresher on how to do certain tasks, cheat sheets allow you to do either one with relative ease. Print them out and decorate your workspace or save/bookmark them for later use, whichever way suits you best.