From a Nigel Waters' comment on Moshe Weitzman's blog post Quick peek into Drupal Commons (about the new Acquia's distribution for social sites):

I ended up trying out Celadon and Marina (Other Fusion-based themes) and there are much nicer with Commons, than the Commons theme (with a bit of tweaking for the distro, of course).

My question is: How is the bit of tweaking needed to use Marina for Drupal Commons? Adding just a few, or many lines of CSS? Or a simple customization with the user interface?

Comments

JBI’s picture

JBI commented

+1

sheena_d’s picture

sheena_d commented

There is a lot of custom CSS in the Commons theme that is specific to commons functionality - specifically for OG views and some of the other modules used in the distro, plus it includes some custom Panels layouts that were built specifically for Drupal Commons and some templates for things like the heartbeat and shoutbox modules that customize that output. Commons should work fine with any other Fusion-based theme, but you'll miss out on some nice things like the node type icons on content lists, speech bubble style shoutbox messages, etc.

Of course, it may also be fairly easy to copy the Commons theme's templates over to your copy of Marina and copy most of the CSS out of the Commons theme and into your local.css file.

juan_g’s picture

juan_g commented

sheena_d wrote:
> Of course, it may also be fairly easy to copy the Commons theme's templates over to your copy of Marina and copy most of the CSS out of the Commons theme and into your local.css file.

Thanks. I'm thinking, a similar solution for easier maintenance could be to install Marina as a subtheme of the Commons theme, so that Marina automatically overrides part of Commons, but uses the rest. Probably this also would need some tweaking, adding or removing CSS lines in Marina.

sheena_d’s picture

sheena_d commented
Assigned: Unassigned » sheena_d
Category: support » feature

Juan_g,

That is definitely a possibility and it couldn't hurt to experiment, but there is a known Drupal bug that causes theme settings to not be inherited by grand-child themes (http://drupal.org/node/481142) so you would lose your Fusion theme settings if you made Marina a sub theme of Commons.

We're looking into the possibility of adding Commons support to Marina. I'll post here if anything happens in that direction.

juan_g’s picture

juan_g commented

About that sub-sub-theme bug for D6, there is a patch (#26) waiting for review. Hopefully it will fix it.

sheena_d wrote:
> We're looking into the possibility of adding Commons support to Marina. I'll post here if anything happens in that direction.

Adding themes for Drupal Commons, like Marina, would be really great. Thank you very much for considering it.

juan_g’s picture

juan_g commented

#481142: Theme settings forms are not inherited by sub-themes has just been fixed today. This means that, when Drupal 6.20 is released (it's 6.19 now), we will be able to install any Fusion theme, like Marina, as a subtheme of the Commons theme. This opens very interesting possibilities.

For those who might want to test it now, new bug fixes are added to Drupal 6.x-dev twice a day.

jp2020’s picture

jp2020 commented

Hi Juan_g,

Where could I take a look at how drupal commons looks with the marina theme?

Thanks,
JP

juan_g’s picture

juan_g commented

There are some general screenshots of Acquia Marina, but I don't know of any specifically for Commons yet. At this point, you would need to overwrite part of Drupal Commons with Drupal 6.x-dev on a test site, not a simple task. It's easier to wait for Drupal 6.20 and a Commons update.

Wolfflow’s picture

Wolfflow commented

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allan1015’s picture

allan1015 commented

Sorry for a nub question but how does Marina get placed as a subtheme?

I placed the marina folder in the:
profile->drupal_commons->themes->acquia_commons folder
set it as default, left acquia_commons and fusion as enabled - the result wasnt pretty

tech4him’s picture

tech4him commented

installed acquia_marina.
edited the acquia_marina.info file
changed the base theme = fusion_core to now read
base theme - acquia_commons
enable the Acquia Marina theme.

It's still not great and there are lots of CSS tweaks that would still need to happen but in answer to your question about grand-child sub-themes... that's how I did it. Not sure if it is 100% the right way to go but gives much better results thus far.