drupal

Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).

There are only two or three Drupal modules that I have installed on every single Drupal site I set up. At the top of this short list is Global Redirect. There are many reasons for its existence, not the least of which is Search Engine Optimization. Global Redirect does such niceties as remove slashes from the end of URLs and makes sure the home page of the site is the standard home page, and not an alias to it (like /front, or /home-page).

I was browsing the Drupal Theme Garden a few days ago and was reflecting on how incredibly boring (if not ugly) a large share of the themes looked. Out of all the themes I viewed (over 50), I might consider using only 10 or so on a production site for a quick project that I didn't want to create a theme for.

Later on, I read this post on Steven Witten's blog [Acko.net] from 2007, and read through every single comment, because I am extremely interested in the issue of Drupal theming. If you are at all interested in helping Drupal be more themeable and appealing to designers, you must read the post linked to above. Go ahead - read it. I'll wait...

...okay, now that you're back,

A few of the comments in Steve's blog post deserve a mention...

From the blog posting itself: "Not enough Drupal people are savvy enough about theming and design to help out with even small tasks (like a banner) or even give quality tips and feedback on other work. The result is that theming and design receives little attention. Most contributed themes and sites could look a lot better, if they just themed it some more. And getting patches into core that give the defaults a little more oomph is tough, as they are often considered to be useless embellishments.

Well, six weeks after leaving the Seminary, I thought I'd provide a small bit in the way of an update about where I am now, as I have finally had a little time to settle into my new role as a member of the the non-seminarian laity. (You can see from my former post that I have figured out that cookies will now have to be made by me, rather than from some magical source that automatically replenishes the kitchen's cookie jar!).

The New Job