Theme development

Hi! It's weird but when I replace the .png icons of the theme with my own png icons, the transparency is get replaced by a grey field. Evidently I publish my png incorrectly. I export icons from Photoshop CS, i tried several varients (saving with alph field, etc.) but still instead of transparency I get the grey in the browser. Please, advise me how to publish PNG correctly?

Hi there,

We are in need of design help for our charity website. So far I have only used the default theme. Can any guru theme designers help us get the site more professional looking? Thanks so much.

David
BandaAID
www.bandaaid.com
david.stone@bandaaid.com

Hey all

Im getting somewhere with drupal, except the theme part. I've downloaded one of the themes on drupal.org, (and the phptemplate engine), and i uploaded the files to the themes/mythemes folder (which i created). Now, how do i see it in the administrator menu?
It still only shows the 4 original templates........i know i did something wrong.

Heres how my folder tree works:

themes/mythemes/"themename"

is that right?

Please help!

Thanks,
Rusty

I'm having a heck of a time trying to figure out how to make modifications to the display for a teaser in my theme. I am currently working on modifying the layout for a "What's New..." section on a site I am working on, which I want to have the headlines and teasers, plus a "Read More ..." link under the teaser. The "what's new" items are actually blog posts (though I am not sure that is the best way to do this; see comments below)

I figured out after a bit of head scratching and looking at other themes that this can be done as follows:

  // Allow modules to change $node->body before viewing.
  node_invoke_nodeapi($node, 'view', $teaser, $page);
  if ($links) {
    $node->links = module_invoke_all('link', 'node', $node, !$page);
  }
  // unset unused $node part so that a bad theme can not open a security hole
  if ($teaser) {
    unset($node->body);
  }
  else {
    unset($node->teaser);
  }

  return theme('node', $node, $teaser, $page);
}

Hi! I've just started to work on the drupal based project and I'm responsible for the Theme adaptation. I'm acquainted with the PHP but it's far from prof. So I'm working on the XTemplate as it seems to me more stable. I've got a probleme: I really need that the 'primary_links' get the state of 'active' dynamicaly and keep it while I'm in the specified (by path)directory. Almost the same way as 'tabs' work. I've looked through the scripts, but I wouldn't say that I've got the clear picture of how to do it. If you have some ideas, please help me!

I mean, really, how many of us have actually taken the time out to view the page source which is generated by the chamelelon theme? It generates tons of non-sensical, unruly tangled HTML. I understand that we all get ants in our pants sometimes, especially when we see it working on the screen, but I would be embarrassed to have released that theme file with my name in it. Seriously.

On the other hand, while working with the theme file in order to get it to yield some valid (or closer to valid) XHTML I was awestruck by the possibilities of this theming method. If you actually could get a plain php theme to yield XHTML which was completely valid, then applying a CSS style to that page would be a breeze. Is it really necesscary to have table based themes and intermediate engines involved, when we have complete control over the look and feel of the page with just CSS? Sure, if you want to offer some customization options to those who aren't well-versed in CSS or PHP, I can understand, but I would have to argue that learning CSS would be a much more valuable way to spend time than banging one's head around to learn PHP, theme engines, template files, AND CSS. What do we need to do to get there?

First, clean up the output. By simply keeping track of the page source while editing the plain php theme file, you can achieve the correct indentation to nest your tags. This is the first step to acheiving a source XHTML that we can work with. Also, by creating clean, valid output, the page becomes infinitely extensible. For instance, if I can make sense of and read what my XHTML output is (which is not currently the case) then if I need to add a few div tags with ids to nest a few components of the page in my .theme file, this is easy. A new class? No problem. Currently, due to the undicpherable output of the theme file, this is not possible.