A change of scenery

Lo and behold, a new theme - A Block by couzinhub.

Functional, unassuming and good looking were the things I was looking for (and in that order) and this theme provides them all by the bucketload.

A little bit of History. Again.

When I first started this site, it had a basic theme - a slight modification to the default theme for pmWiki. It was unassuming and did its job.

Then I moved the site to Drupal. With drupal came a multitude of choices. Good choices, but at times a little overpowering.

In the theme department, I went through Pixture, Wabi and twilight in a matter of days. Good themes, but I could not get them to look how I wanted - beautiful yet unassuming. Then I came across I Feel Dirty - another beautiful theme, but this time as unassuming as I wanted it to be.

Only one problem - it was a little claustrophobic with a width of just 760 pixels. Actually two problems - due to its design, some content,. such as images did not fit well within its blocks, but both were small sacrifices to a good theme and I was happy.

That was 'til when randomly browsing cvs commits on the drupal website, I saw a commit of something called "ablock". Intrigued, I went to the project page and saw it was a theme. A simple theme. Something I could like. Only problem was that it was for drupal 5 only. I posted an issue with a patch to move it to drupal 6, which was quickly accepted. Only other problem was that the theme was a little bright (anmd I did not want to modify the module files - this site is supposed to be low maintenance).

Well, that problem is no more. Yesterday, a commit was made to allow color.module support, and I have jumped on the theme's bandwaggon. There are still some issues, such as blocks bleeding through, and the pager looking ugly, but I am willing to ignore them for now.

There however is also something else that theme designers should be aware of: fonts. Not all fonts are available on all platforms, but a lot of time this can be ignored as there would be good equivalents.

While Microsoft have Times New Roman and Arial, Fedora has Liberation Serif and Liberation Sans - the fonts have the same metrics. (There is Helvetica available in place of Arial on many platforms). The otehr popular font - Verdana - is harder to replace, but DejaVu Sans does a good approximation, even if it is a little narrower than Verdana.

The A block theme, however, makes generous use of the Trebuchet MS font, which is Particular to the Microsoft platforms.

Windows Vista

[img_assist|nid=45|title=A Block Theme in Windows Vista|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=400|height=284] On Windows Vista, the menus look fancy, and the whole site is readable. There are some issues, but they are more from the fact that this theme is not yet complete. EDIT: Since taking the pictures, I have moved the read More and add new comment section to below the content, instead of next to the submitted by info.

The Trebuchet MS font is used too much and the content text does not benefit from its cramped style. Something more readable, such as Verdana should be better for the content.

Windows is the dominant desktop platform, and most themes will look good on here, so the findings are not surprising, except for some tweaks needed to finish the theme (I am currently using a development snapshot), this is how the designer probably intended the theme to look.

Fedora 9

[img_assist|nid=44|title=Ablock Theme in Fedora 9|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=400|height=290] And this is how the same theme looks in Fedora 9 without any other changes. The replacement font as chosen by the system is DejaVu Sans. The menus do not look as fancy, but the main content text is IMO more readable.

Once again there is monotony in the fonts, but this time for a different reason - any fancy fonts not available in Fedora would be replaced. Both Trebuchet and the proposed Verdana would still be replaced by the same font - DejaVu Sans.

As a preference, I like "Trebuchet MS" for the menu items, but "DejaVu Sans" for the content.