By brianestadt on

Hi all, a little background on www.UPGinsider.com:

At the end of August, I was told by campus administration that the budget for our campus newspaper was being cut in half. This forced some tough decisions ... we ended our print edition and migrated to the web. Rather than sign a contract with collegepublisher.com or similar hosting sites, I opted to go with Drupal. My last web programming experience (if you could call it that) was with html in the mid-1990s. So I posted a bunch of questions in the forums and tried to get a functional and hopefully somewhat attractive website up and running ASAP so the students would have an outlet for their writing. Even though I know it's far from perfect (esp. this first semester), I'd like your thoughts on The Insider. It's based on the Andreas01 theme.

A few questions for those of you kind enough to help me as I try to learn CSS and other web-management tricks:

1. Which file should I edit to change the font size of the slogan ("UPG's student-run newspaper since 1989") and make it bold with the 'strong' tag?

2. What would I edit to change the style (I'd like the strong gray effect that I'm going for in the slogan mentioned above) of the date block that I have at the top right of the right column?

3. In the left column, I would like to break the "Viewed Best" block outside of the bluish box. How do I do this?

4. I don't expect a quick answer to this one, but if anyone has advice, it'd be much appreciated: Since we have the publication date posted atop the right column, we don't need the teasers on the front page to include the date. But since stories are archived, I'd like the stories to include the date below the bylines. Any suggestions?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

brianestadt’s picture

brianestadt commented

It took me 20 days to go from this post at http://drupal.org/node/83158 to getting the site online. So kudos to Drupal!

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

For 1) add some additional rules to style.css, this will work

#header p {
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 1.4em;
}

Note your page.tpl.php seems to have a error as there is a close anchor tag </a> and closing header tag </h1> at the begining of the header div (without the opening tags)

For 2) also in style.css

#block-block-14 {
color: #bbb;
}

Adjust the #bbb to get the level of grey you want, #111 -> #eee (#000 is black, #fff is white)

For 3) you really need to seperate out that last block into a new region (see: http://drupal.org/node/29139)
You could do

#block-block-16 {
background-color: white;
}

but that will leave a grey "border" around it.

As for 4) it sound like you want to not show the dates on the front page but anywhere else is ok. One way to do this is in node.tpl.php (or it's variations) is to add code that uses $is_front, you could add the date when $is_front is false. If you only want the date for other than the current issue there are ways to do that but it requires more details of how things are set up.

brianestadt’s picture

brianestadt commented

I really appreciate the help. My goal is to have a basic enough understanding of CSS to -- in addition to the gradual tweaks added throughout this semester -- evolve the site from one that leans heavy on the Andreas01 presets into its own personality in the spring semester.

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org’s picture

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org commented

Quite an accomplishment. Nice clean look. I liked the way you got something workable up, without getting bogged down in technical details.

Could I ask two questions?

1) How did you do the bylines? Are you using Flexinode or CCK?

2) How difficult was it for the student staff to adapt to writing and editing via Drupal?

Thanks, Bart

brianestadt’s picture

brianestadt commented

For bylines, we just add 'strong' tags for the name and 'i' tags for the titles. That's it.

Not sure what you mean with the second question ... The students aren't writing or editing with Drupal. They write/edit with word processors and then cut/paste the finished stories and upload them into the website. Aside from adding content, they don't have much interaction with the Drupal CMS at all.

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org’s picture

bart@drupal.energybulletin.org commented

Thanks, that's just what I wanted to know. We're embarking on a similar project and I'm glad to learn that it's worked out for you.