By visitor82 on

I hope the community can help because the vendor wasn't at all helpful. I'm not a total newbie but I'm no expert either.

I have a live site that works fine but my lack of theme modifying skills led me to buy this commercial theme by cowboy via templatemonster.com (which I seriously love the look of) and I am playing with it on my localhost test site before uploading it to my live site.

http://www.templatehelp.com/preset/pr_preview.php?i=26713&pr_code=yBNLDX...

The theme has the following regions - left sidebar / right sidebar / content / footer / custom

My problems are

1. No matter which of my existing blocks I try in left sidebar nothing appears.
2. I have no idea what the custom region is. Once again no matter what block I try to make appear in there I have no luck
3. I don't know how to go about achieving the three column affect on the front page with the heading "recent projects" (this one is my main problem) ditto two columns on other pages

If I was starting from scratch I could use the templates content and just change it to suit, but because I already have a site/database with my own content I'm lost.

There is a zipped file called "sources" which I thought about trying to extract the html from but drupal won't let me unzip it presumably because it doesn't want it to override the database in my local site.

I suspect I can upgrade my skills and recreate that look but the point of buying the theme was so I didn't have to :-(

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

thorshammer’s picture

thorshammer commented

Having looked at your page.tpl.php and .info files, two details:
1) Where did you determine that the template is potentially 3-column (homepage or otherwise)? I don't see any sign of it on the template demo site pages (and the page template doesn't include it).
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2) if you do in fact need to have that column there:
(a) do you want it all the way down the left side of the page-content (incl. next to the header)? If so, place the DIV code - my suggestion below - in your page.tpl.php right after the DIV id="main" line55, and make sure it's closing tag occurs before the following DIV id="header" tag line57;
(b) if you want the left-column occurring in the body BELOW the header, place the DIV code after DIV id="cont" line121, and before DIV id="cont-col" line127.
("cont" being short-hand for content)
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Since your .info file already includes the statement: regions[left] = Left sidebar, you can use that in your template. Add something like the following in page.tpl.php (based on the above location):

<?php if ($left) : ?>  // $left is merely the region name above converted to a variable, that will contain any block content 
                            // that you drop into that region from the Blocks admin. panel
<div id="left-sidebar"><?php print($left) ?></div>
<?php endif;?>

Then add the id "left-sidebar" to your css (if not already there) and style it, mimicking the stylings already there for id "right-col" and class "ind". While good PHP form dictates that positioning (incl. sizing, margins etc.) be done in layout.css, having seen the page template (not very good Drupal template form) I wouldn't assume that you have that css in your template package. If not, just add it to your (theme-name).css.
**IMPORTANT: for scenario (b) in #2 above, make sure you add the attribute "float:left" to both the left-sidebar id you are adding, as well as the "cont-col" div that immediately follows it in the template.
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(3) Your .info file makes no reference to your stylesheets. You should add a statement like the following for each stylesheet to be included in your theme:
stylesheets[all][] = (name).css (substitute name of course).

visitor82’s picture

visitor82 commented

Brilliantly detailed answer thanks thorshammer ;-)

That all makes sense. FWIW I thought the template could display three columns because in admin/build/block it allows left and right sidebars as well as content and footer.

Thanks again !

thorshammer’s picture

thorshammer commented

Also FWIW, what you see in Blocks Administration merely reflects what's been declared in the theme's .info file with the "Regions" statements. Unfortunately the template designer didn't implement it.

Come back and let us know how that's working out, I'd like to know.

visitor82’s picture

visitor82 commented

Sorry for taking a little while to come back thorshammer. I wasn't happy with my lack of understanding of theming so I decided to start from scratch and build a mindmap of the drupal system as a (re) learning tool. Previously I have just muddled along using firebug and/or looking up what to do without a proper understanding of why I'm doing it. I am still far from being totally across it but I'm a lot closer.

Anyway your advice was spot on and it has done exactly what I was after, success ;-).

Your coments about the theme code generally being sloppy has given me the idea to set myself a goal of making it totally drupal and W3C compliant.

Thanks for your interest/effort/energy.

WazzaD

thorshammer’s picture

thorshammer commented

So glad that's working out for you.
Feel free to come back here and post your "results" - or work-in-progress. Always interested.