I recently took down my blog at inthealternative.net and decided to rebuild it from the ground up. I'm having a little trouble deciding on a theme, though. Drupal.org has an embarrassment of riches, but I"m not sure which theme I want to use. So many look so great!
I'd like to run this as a blog with an eye toward doing a group blog or magazine feel somewhere down the road. In general, I like:
* Plenty of regions available from the get-go for customization
* Well-commented .css files and .tpl.php files. I can tinker with code, but I get lost easily. I'd appreciate being able to tweak things in the theme here or there.
* Fluid, tableless themes that valide well in XHTML.
Any suggestions? At some point in the future, I might sit down with a base theme and code something from scratch, but for now I'd like to get the blog going again ...
Comments
I've been searching through
I've been searching through the themes lately with similar goals in mind and found the Acquia series of themes to be quite nice. I'm using the Acquia Slate theme, and finding it very easy to customize in diverse ways.
Also, I've found the book "Front End Drupal" to be a great guide to taking control of a theme and significantly enriching it with simple java script / jquery logic. Very easy walk through for getting java script going in an existing theme for your own personalizations. Prior to the book I knew no java script, and a few weeks later I'm surprised with with I can do with only a few lines of code.
Get firebug if you don't already use it, essential to locating where to make modifications to the css, html, and so forth.
good luck!
-Blake
www.BlakeSenftner.com www.MissingUbercartManual.com www.cg-general-store.com www.droplabs.net
Firebug!!!
Holy crap dude, i just read what you said about firebug, and I went and had a look, installed it and went and had a look at the project page I am trying to copy ideas from. HOLY CRAP firebug makes it WAAAAY easier to see what's going on in all that code!
"Get firebug if you don't already use it" That is seriously the best piece of advice I have received so far this month! Thank you so much!
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Yeah, Firebug should be
Yeah, Firebug should be recommendation #1 for anyone making web sites.
-Blake
www.BlakeSenftner.com www.MissingUbercartManual.com www.cg-general-store.com www.droplabs.net
number two recommendation
after firebug, if you're still trying to dive into drupal for the first time, then the "Devel" module is recommendation #2. it's like Firebug, for Drupal.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
One more thing!!!
For my .tpl.php files with CSS fields, I cheated a little bit. I cranked up contemplate, which spat out code to display my fields. Because I don't want to be dependent on Contemplate, I took the code, copied it, and dropped it into the relevent .tpl.php file to customize at my leisure.