theming

Not sure what that title even means... But anyway, hey, lookee here, it's a new theme. A slapdash tossed salad of a theme, to be sure, but it's officially mine, hewed from Zen. Which, as all legend holds, is indeed a nice theme for hacking by the design-inept. My deepest gratitude to all who have made it such a great tool for newbies and pros alike.

Clearly, more work is needed. Why can I never put good colors together? (My childhood: "But why can't I wear plaid with plaid?") Watch change unfold live in the coming days.

And hey, it feels good to be on Drupal 6! Lots of nice things going on under the hood. Keep your modems pointed this way for more soon.

The problem: Themes that are "recolorable" with the Color module are working fine on my sites B, C, D, etc., but not site A. On that site, *choosing* a new color scheme works fine, but those new colors just won't show. Here's why it's strange:

These here themes, they customize up real good, they do.

Moving beyond your first site(s) and that Garland theme? (It's so spiffy, but just leaves you hungry for more...) As a new Drupaler, you'll see that massive Santa's bag of themes at drupal.org, and go nutsy-whacko, downloading everything in sight. "Oooh, look at this one... and I know I can use that one... and wow, this one, so green..." 

And you'll install your new two dozen themes to play with, and you'll find much good... and much other. 

They're not all created equal; some just don't look as nice (or work as nicely) as you thought they would. More commonly, you'll find that a theme's clever and lovely designer has created a theme that's stupendous, but just not right for your needs. Common features that leave me crestfallen: Lack of a sidebar or other region I was hoping to see; text format bummers (like block quotes that appear no different from other text, or h3 and h4 headline tags that look the same); and admin pages that "break" and become unusable due to width issues.

That's OK; once you're past that first site or few, you'll feel the bug to make any theme all your custom own! It turns out that while some of those themes don't excite out of the box, they customize well, amiably changing form with easy CSS tweaks.

Good moddin'

On his blog, Geshan lists themes he's found easy to mod in 5 Drupal themes I've worked on. Let me make a similar list of my own here:

Most Benevolent Reader GreenLED informs me that this site is showing major visual bugs in Internet Explorer. Aaargh, I had hoped I was immune to that curse...

I don't have a ready means to test my output in Internet Explorer, having no Windows computer. Alas, it looks like I'll need to use virtualization software in my upcoming MacBook Pro purchase, just for the purpose of testing sites on IE.