I’ll be experimenting with different themes for barnson.org over the next few days, as I try to incorporate Jon Brusco’s graphics, and correct a whole bunch of HTML problems with the theme I’m using, called “polder”.
“Polder” is really cool, handles stuff in a really nifty way, but unfortunately just doesn’t adhere to HTML standards well. I’m a big fan of validating my HTML, and looking at the number of changes I’d have to make to polder to make it valid transitional HTML is just exhausting, so I’ll probably be using another theme as a basis to create mine.
Wish me luck!
Yummy…
OK, so far the changes I’ve made have been pretty yummy. The main page validates just fine, although the comments pages don’t. I think I know why, but it’s a pretty deep problem in Drupal regarding non-substition of entity names for the left bracket &91; and right square bracket &93; characters. Guess it’s probably time for me to start contributing to Drupal, since I’m enjoying it so much.
Of course, my ultimate goal with Drupal is to create a theme called “pedantic”. This is where every single item on the page has class names and entity names so that we’re totally freed from the leftblock/rightblock idea, and end-users can use CSS to completely control the layout of the site.
Hey, I can dream, can’t I? Drupal near that flexible at this point, unfortunately. But I was inspired by the CSS Zen Garden. That amazing place just goes to show that, if given appropriate class, html, and entity (I think that’s what they are called? Unique items in a page?) values, you can do some really amazing layout work.