Windows 7
I managed to get an offer for Windows 7 Professional for £30 (as a download only version - it is available to all people who are "students" or teachers or have access to an email address ending in .sch.uk or .ac.uk and a few others too) and since my Vista installation was both slow and the install of Vista Service Pack two was constantly failing, I thought it would be a good offer to waste the money. I did and this post is being written from Windows 7 Professional.
What is the difference between Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional? who cares - it has more features - most of which I will not use, but since they were both on offer for the same price, why would I go for the one with less features?
Firefox Plugin checker
A good page launched by Mozilla - the plugin checker page allows you to see which plugins are out of date.
A good thing I think.
Fixing Internet Explorer 6 and it's broken css :hover selector
For the Arthemia theme I ported to drupal, I ran into a small hurdle - IE6 does not support the css :hover selector and this made the drop downs fail on IE6.
Luckily, I also found a solution: Whatever:hover:
Most modern browsers support the :hover selector for any html element. This is cool, because it enables you to, for instance, apply a mouseover effect to table rows using only CSS. IE however, has an erratic support for :hover at best, depending on the particular version your visitor is using.
Whatever:hover is a small script that automatically patches :hover, :active and :focus for IE6, IE7 and IE8 quirks, letting you use them like you would in any other browser. Version 3 introduces ajax support, meaning that any html that gets inserted into the document via javascript will also trigger :hover, :active and :focus styles in IE.
Simple and easy drop down (Suckerfish) menus for Drupal 6
For the Arthemia theme I was trying to find a nice and simple way to add suckerfish menus. However most solutions involved either magic incantations or jquery plugins. A little too much.
Just as I was about to give up hope, I had a look at the Multiflex-3 theme for drupal and its implementation of suckerfish menus. Finally, something that was simple and easy to follow! No js either, which IMO is a good thing.
The actual code in the template.php file from multiflex-3 that you will need to add/work with is:
<?php
/**
* Return a cascade primary links.
* Clone implementation from user_block().
*
* @return
* a themed cascade primary links.
*/
function phptemplate_primary() {
$output = '<div id="primary-links-region">';
$output .= menu_tree(variable_get('menu_primary_links_source', 'primary-links'));
$output .= '</div>';
return $output;
}
?>Arthemia for Drupal
I have recently been working on porting the Arthemia Free Wordpress theme to Drupal.
I have set up a demo site to demonstrate the theme.
I have made much progress - to the point that the theme works and looks good, but my modifications are not complete yet. I want it to be more than a simple port, but to also fix any other issues with the other theme.
What I have done beyond simple porting:
- Changed the font for the main article content to Verdana/DejaVu Sans
- Added colours to tables,
- Themed the comments separately,
- Added colours to tables,
- Allow a local.css file to be dropped into the folder to override/extend/modify some theming elements.
I think I have got pretty far, and the theme looks very good, however I do think there needs to be some work on the colours used for tables and comments.