...A new Drupal Theme for TechRepublican.
Will you help us choose our new theme?
Here's the deal: Over the holidays, we're going to be upgrading TechRepublican from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5.
This gives us a good opportunity to swap our theme (how the site looks-and-feels).
I'm looking to simplify the blog quite a bit. I'm even tempted to remove most, if not everything, from the right-hand side of the blog. It's a bit cluttered.
I want you to participate in this process by recommending a theme. You can view the available themes at the Drupal Theme Garden. Just click the link, and then search through the available themes for one you like.
*Important* Make sure you're looking at Drupal 5 themes.
Think clean, simple, and modern. Less is more.
Leave your recommendation (via a link) and why you like that theme in the comments of this post.
I'll put your recommendations, along with a few of my own, to the site's contributors for a vote.
This is also a good time to identify new contributors and clear out some of those who no longer actively participate in the discussion. If you think you have what it takes, email me at David.All AT TechRepublican.com and make your case.
Thank you.
Comments
De-clutter
One thing that you can do to de-clutter any theme is, if you want to still have a blogroll and recent comments and whatever, is to (sort of) hide those sections with javascript to make them collapsible/expandable. That way, the links to those whom you've blogrolled will still be there (and will be seen by Google, TTLB, etc.), but the readers will have the option to see them if they want to, but they're collapsed by default.Â
This of course won't work for readers who have javascript disabled, but I doubt there are that many who do that. Â
I have this at my site, if you want to see what I'm talking about. Actually, I've got quite a bit collapsed because I've got an itchy blogroll finger. ;-)
Also
Are you looking for a two- or three-column layout?
There are some nice ones at the Drupal theme site that can be tweaked to have different colors and button images--those are pretty easy tweaks (I can do it, if you need it).
* IE6 *
BTW, it would be VERY helpful if someone who uses the monstrosity that is IE6 would have a look at those themes, too. It's been my (very painful) experience that a lot of free theme authors don't validate their designs in IE6, which, alas, is still used by a lot of people (one is too many, IMHO, but some are forced to use it at work). There's nothing worse than getting a nice new theme, customizing it, and then finding out it's a mess in IE6.Â
ARGH!!!!!
I just spent the last hour combing through the themes and their respective support pages and had a list and LOST MY POST! ARGH!
Off the top of my head: Combustion, Vote Bob, Mondrian - Combustion and Mondrian will need color/image modifications, but all three have pretty good coding and are bug-free.
Drupera - no support page, so it'll have to be thoroughly tested for browser bugs.
Aurora - will require some knowledge of Drupal modules to fix some outstanding bugs.
Nonzero - very nice (probably my favorite)! No MAJOR outstanding issues/bugs.
Denver - theme author seems pretty responsive to issues.
Most of these have color schemes that you'll probably want to change, but that's easy. Whatever you pick, BE SURE to check each theme's project page (except Drupera, b/c it doesn't exist) to make sure it's not a buggy mess. Most of the themes there are pretty much more work than they're worth.
Are you really just looking for a new "look?" If this theme is working, some cosmetic changes would be much easier to do than uploading/modifying/testing a whole new theme, y'know. Personally, I like this layout but I completely understand the desire to de-clutter, and I know how gray can get really old, really fast (ymmv?). Both of those can be fixed without a lot of effort.
Excellent Suggestions Beth!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Anymore thoughts TechRepublicans?
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