By freyquency on

I'm not sure if anyone here has noticed this yet, but Drupal (and Mambo) are mentioned in The Zen of CSS Design by css Zen Garden creator Dave Shea and Molly E. Holzschlag.

It's on page 117 in the chapter "Not So Minimal", regarding overflow problems.

"A further problem when working concurrently with standards based design and CMS software is that many popular systems generate invalid markup mixed with legacy presentational tags... The situation is improving, however, and more recent CMS software does a much better job of generating valid XHTML/CSS out of the box. Popular open-source CMS packages include Drupal (www.drupal.org) and Mambo (www.mamboserver.com).

Pretty cool.

Comments

hedgemage@www.binaryredneck.net’s picture

hedgemage@www.binaryredneck.net commented

Awesome!

HedgeMage

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

I made a phpTemplate as a learning excercise that output divs in the pattern of cssZengarden. It worked really well. It showed me that doing a flexible, generic css position based 1/2/3 column layout that functioned well in all three states is really really hard.

But if you could control your site, it was easy enough. I never released the base template as those sites as demo/learning tools, not strip and re-use the themes. :)

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

kohlerj’s picture

kohlerj commented

I am a big fan of cssZengarden. When I tried to duplicate some effects, especially rounded corners, I found that my base theme (chameleon) did not have enough "hooks" for css. I think that's what sets the cssZen stylesheets apart from most others I've seen... after all, you can't style it if you can't access it. And that's what's missing in chameleon (which is what I use atm).

__
ek is 'n hekker | mi parolas esperanton | shosholoza!

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Um, you can add as many DIV tags as you want/need with phpTemplate. It's the advantage of using it. You can add DIV's to chmeleon, but you have to hard code them and have a better understanding of php

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

kohlerj’s picture

kohlerj commented

Now that I've had a bit of practice with Chameleon, maybe I'll tackle phpTemplate.

ek is 'n hekker | mi parolas esperanton | shosholoza!

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

I started with Chameleon and move to phptemplate. There is a lot of flexibility with phpTemplate.

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

phptemplate is great. It took me a while but I'm really happy with the results, fluid 1/2/3 column layouts. I've created admin.tpl.php where there are additional declarations that max out the overall width so that tables don't overlap columns or vice versa. Currently I'm trying out edit.tpl.php where only the tabular controls are displayed and the blocks are disabled, hopefully making editing easier for those who are new to drupal.

It definitely takes a lot of work creating a theme that takes full advantage of the features phptemplate (and drupal) has. After I finish reading The Zen of CSS Design I'm hoping to clean things up and add the theme and subsequent designs here. I'm realizing now that there is no reason that Drupal themes can't be as elegant as css Zen Garden themes.

rcross’s picture

rcross commented

I'm sure i'm not the only one interested in that submission. BTW, any information about getting the drupal theme gallery back in action?

--Ryan
Ryan Cross
James Cross Construction Services
Project Management Software

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Soon. our volunteers are working as fast as they can :).

Seriously though, Drupal.org is running on the new servers. The maillist was transferred over this weekend. Some initial replication of the cvs repository has been tested in preparation for the cvs being moved as well. After cvs gets moved and tested is when theme garden gets addressed.

In the meantime, these same folks for the most part have continued work on 4.7

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

freyquency’s picture

freyquency commented

I couldn't put my finger on it until I started reading the book, but another great thing that css Zen Garden does is promote what it's showcasing through a convincing argument.

Perhaps there should be a theme showcase page that says "Why Drupal?" or promote Drupal theming. It would be great if the main page had a 'static' essay about drupal themes and links to the new themes.