By -Anti- on

Noob here. Basically, I don't understand where the names for css elements originate from.

For instance, I wanted to try to style the zen primary links with the amadou css.
I thought I could just find the css in amadou's style.css and copy it across to the zen style.css.

However, the elements for the primary menu in amadou are:

#menu li a:hover, #menu li a.active
and
#menu li a {

But all zen appears to have is:
#primary
{
}

Huh? Because the primary menu is core, this throws up many, many questions for me.

1)
how does drupal know that #menu li a:hover styles the primary menu in amadou, if
the script which handles the menu is expecting it to be styled using #primary?

2)
Does this mean that all the themes use different, customised css elements?
If so, I don't understand this - I would have expected ALL the themes to have to
use the same 'base' css elements throughout their design for sake of consistency? Zen even
includes a 'drupal6-reference.css' file, but what good is it if none of the themes use it?

This has me completely, totally confused now. I don't know enough css to write my own menu
buttons from scratch, but it seems like I can't copy/paste css from other designs either?

Thanks for any enlightenment.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

dasithds’s picture

dasithds commented

Every theme will have its own set of css elements.... and you assign specific classes or ids to specific divisions of a page... thats done inside the .tpl file.... also the system has its own set of default css styles... what a custom theme does is override it.

also its easier for the themer to create his own set of elements than have to look everything up from a 'base' set...

Dasith.

http://www.mytechdaily.com

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

Thanks for your reply.

So, can anyone show me the basics of how to get Zen to recognise and
use #menu li a:hover etc the primary menu, rather than #primary?

What I'm attempting to do is use the basic 'look' of amadou to create a similar theme in Zen,
because I can't use the amadou 'two-menus-at-one-side' layout (prefering the Zen liquid
three-column layout) but I like the 'style' of amadou.

Thanks.

dasithds’s picture

dasithds commented

add the #menu li a:hover to the zen stylesheet and rename menu to primary... its the same thing you are asking but backwards.

Dasith

http://www.mytechdaily.com

-Anti-’s picture

-Anti- commented

> and rename menu to primary

OK, I understand. I don't have a clue what I'm doing, but I'll try it tonight.
Thanks for your reply.

So, just to clarify a small revelation that I just had a moment ago...

Does this mean that drupal core scripts have NO style information hardcoded into them at all?
Every single bit of styling and positioning is done in the theme's php files?
So in some of the zen theme php files, somewhere there will be a php 'snippet' which prints
the primary menu, and it will have class=primary in it?

Cheers.

dasithds’s picture

dasithds commented

the modules and core have their own unique styles but the theme that is used by the admin overrides all that.

Dasith.

http://www.mytechdaily.com