Jeff Eaton has made a new Drupal theme, the Gutenberg theme, which lets you use Movable Type styles. This makes hundreds of existing designs available to Drupal enthusiasts. Jeff writes about the inspiration, motivation and execution of his feat. The story is on Digg.

Comments

Cool_Goose’s picture

Well this is great imho :).
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Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource.

toma’s picture

cool, how about joomla themes?! :) nice work, it will be great to offer users to theme there blog, the website with archive styles doesn't work for me !

Cool_Goose’s picture

It's http://www.thestylearchive.com/ not http://www.thestylarchive.com/ like in the link :P a little typo
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Be Smart, Think Free, Choose OpenSource.

eaton’s picture

One of the reasons Movable Type is such a clean conversion is that its styles tend to be 'pure' CSS -- designers produce a CSS file, a bunch of images, and work against the standard HTML output that Movable Type generates. This means that that Drupal is really only emulating one theme -- the stock Movable Type HTML. Systems with more dynamic and variable HTML output, like Joomla! and Wordpress, are a lot harder to convert since the underlying markup can be very different from theme to theme. In those cases, it's necessary to port themes over one by one.

The only other site I can think of that shares the 'pure css' approach is MySpace -- and I think we're all better off if no one tries to create a MySpace emulation theme. ;-)

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Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion

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Eaton — Partner at Autogram

agentrickard’s picture

This implementation gives me some ideas for custom user pages that MySite users have been asking for.

Input welcome: http://drupal.org/node/124408

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agentrickard’s picture

Gutenberg was so cool, I added theme switching to MySite.

Demo: http://therickards.com/mysite/default (using the Star Crash MT theme within a Garland-themed site).

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http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2
Search first, ask good questions later.

drupalfan’s picture

How did you add the MT theme within Garland? (Also, how does one edit an MT theme?)

Wired Consumers

agentrickard’s picture

You don't add MT themes through Garland. You add them using Gutenberg.

http://drupal.org/project/gutenberg

That project has the instructions that you need from a theming perspective.

The MySite module (which I maintain) allows user-based theme selection for viewing MySite pages. The themes that I enabled on the demo site were all MT themes made available through Gutenberg.

--
http://ken.blufftontoday.com/
http://new.savannahnow.com/user/2
Search first, ask good questions later.

toma’s picture

I have an idea to convert templates, themes from other cms to drupal,

http://groups.drupal.org/converting-themes-drupal (waiting for approval)

byrnereese’s picture

As one of the driving forces behind this HTML coding convention, I wonder if it makes sense for us to organize outside the context of our companies and biases to improve upon this standard and to then begin building tools around it?

chrislynch’s picture

I'm just browsing through the vast array of styles that the Gutenberg theme has put at my fingertips - this is fantastic !

Drupal's always had great functionality and a great set of abstracted modules that allow you to build all sorts of functionality. With this theme in play, there is now an easy route to grabbing a theme. This will certainly decrease the "time to live" factor for a lot of sites?

eaton’s picture

If you're building a blog-style site that fits the MT layout paradigm, it will definitely rock. It does reduce flexibility a lot, though -- anyone wanting to really trick out their site will need to finesse things, and probably rework some of the CSS assumptions to match their sites mix of blocks and pages, etc.

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Lullabot! | Eaton's blog | VotingAPI discussion

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Eaton — Partner at Autogram