"nested" : a drupal theme without columns

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Tue, 2006-08-15 22:27

For quite a long time I'd been wishing this blog had an original theme. Not that I dislike Marvin, but I felt it was time to create my own theme, especially after doing work on adding settings to drupal themes.

Since today was bank holiday for the Assumption day, I decided I'd use it to create a theme after one of my pet peeves: white space on web pages.

Dokuwiki vs Google

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Sun, 2006-08-13 15:12

For some months now, I've been noticing that the Audean wiki, which I use as a live documentation site for various aspects of my sites, appeared comparatively rarely in Google search results, although it was referenced in various places and Google cache info (cache:-prefixed queries) showed the site was indexed.

Now, the Audean Wiki is based on Splitbrain's Dokuwiki very convenient Open Source wiki, which often appears in relation with Drupal for documentation purposes, and it appears there are three problems with a default Dokuwiki installation, which prevent effective search engine optimization:

Here's how to overturn these hurdles.

How to add settings to custom Drupal themes

Submitted by Frederic Marand on Thu, 2006-08-10 00:37

One feature I used to find missing in Drupal was the builtin ability to have themes include their own settings, like modules do.

For instance, a theme might allow switching renderings on the fly, without needing activation of specific stylesheets, or CSS or code tweaking, just by choosing parameters in an administration UI. But it was impossible. That is, until tonight.

Since a direct implementation in core seemed unlikely to see the day before 4.8/5.0, I created a proof-of-concept module just for this, called "themesettings".

The details and full source are available as a small demo which adds a "background" setting to a variant of the box_grey PHP theme, to define the background color of all nodes on the fly, just by choosing it from admin/themes/settings2/<chosen theme>. To read and download the code involved... :