By fitness trainer on

Hey, Y'All!

Can anyone advise how the Garland theme may be hacked, for purposes of visual aesthetics, like for example making the "write new comment" and "read more" links on the front page right-justified? Moreover, "semantically" I think that "read more" should come before "add new comment" -- is there a way to reverse the order in which they appear?

I find that everything in Garland is left-justified, and that's just so boring! Sorry to sound like a crazy interior decorator here, but "craftsmanship" matters to me. So is there any way to control justification of "given" elements (like the aforementioned "write new comment" and "read more" links) without hacking into the PHP template thinggy??

Thanks again!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

hollybeary’s picture

hollybeary commented

That is all done through CSS.

boris mann’s picture

boris mann commented

It sounds like you don't want to get into any of the PHPtemplate files. BUT ... opening any of the tpl.php files will show you the basics of the HTML being output. If you want to edit any of them ... go for it. As long as you don't change any of the comment in PHP tags, it's just like editing any other HTML file. That plus CSS should take you pretty far, and from there you can decide if you want to dive into a little bit of PHP as well.

--
The future is Bryght at Raincity Studios

arhak’s picture

arhak commented

Hint: google
There are tons of discussions/forums/books/snippets/etc about it.
Just search for it.
Hint: Firebug to see which style in which css file, lazy solution overwrite the theme's css file for start.
Hint: search on drupal.org

dnewkerk’s picture

dnewkerk commented

Please don't insist on customizing Garland and then say that "theming Drupal is hard" based on that. Theming Drupal is pretty easy. Just don't try hacking a theme that's not meant to be hacked. And no you hardly ever need a single line of PHP, besides the basic bits like <?php print $content; ?> that come with every theme. You may need a bit of PHP to do high end customizations, but you aren't even close to that right now. CSS is also a viable answer 90% or more of the time (just about every single bit of HTML you could name either already has an ID or class assigned to it which you can easily locate in the .css file to adjust or override, or if you understand how CSS works you can even get at any HTML tag to affect it without it having any kind of ID or class on it.

As has been mentioned, Garland is considered a relatively "hard" theme to modify. It is highly customized out of the box and uses various HTML/CSS tricks to attain its layout that may get in the way of what you want to customize. Garland's purpose is a good looking base theme with Drupal core that makes using Drupal more friendly and approachable. Customizing the Garland theme however is not easy. Garland is a nice theme and a good one for new users who are content to simply change its color using the Color feature, place their own logo, etc. Changes beyond that are not really recommended - in that case you're better off going with a different contributed theme, or using a base theme such as Zen. If Zen is too over-the-top with options, then there are more sparse ones to choose from like Hunchbaque (these are best if you want to make a custom theme on top of a basic framework). Advanced Theme Construction Kit (ATCK) looks like a nice base theme too... the page.tpl.php file is a bit complex with possible options, though the CSS looks simple. It would be nice if Garland was a better customizable base theme, since people assume they "ought" to use it as a base theme to customize just since it is the "default" theme, but at the moment it is not (I think despite its imperfections it has been invaluable for increasing the adoption of Drupal, compared to the old default Bluemarine theme). And fortunately there are a wide variety of alternative options.

If you're looking for a more complete/finished theme than a base one, then I can't give any solid recommendation other than by a cursory look at the available theme's code (since I only make custom sites). I've used Alek 2.0 and it's ok, not the best (HTML looks alright, but not ideal use of CSS). I had a look today at A3 Atlantis and it looks pretty well done also, worth a look - the XHTML is clean, simple, and well laid out, and the style.css file is pretty short and sweet compared to other themes. I did some customizations to a friend's site using AD Novus and it wasn't bad, though it's clearly a ported theme from other CMS systems and not quite right in Drupal (good enough to work with though). Just looked at Abarre and it looks good under the hood too (it's made by the same company who made the Spin Magazine Drupal site).

Part of what you seem to be asking for is actually contradictory to itself - you want "theming to be easy", yet you also seem to want point and click adjustments within the Drupal UI with little to no coding of the theme needed. The two are mutually exclusive. UI-controlled theme features exponentially increase the complexity of the underlying theme code. This applies to "all" CMSes. If you do want themes that have more UI controlled customizations, Joomla may be a better option for you (as that is a bigger priority to them), however don't expect to open up the theme code and find it to be "easy".

By "everything is left justified" what do you mean? Left aligned text (not justified) is standard and ideal from a typographical standpoint. Never right align or center text, unless you really have a good reason. Justified text of any kind is never recommended as it decreases readability when not done correctly (e.g. you may note that books are usually justified - that is because either someone goes through page by page adjusting every line, adding hyphens, etc, or else software handles it as Word/etc does. Web browsers don't do that though). If you really do want to change text alignment though, it's as simple as a single line of CSS, and which line that is can be easily found with Firebug.

-- David
absolutecross.com