Andre Molnar

Drupal BlueBeach Theme Reverse Engineered

Well after all the talk about whether or not to release the bluebeach theme... and all the talk about the theoreticaly possibility of reproducing the them - I found a few spare hours to go ahead and do it.

View Screen Shot

I am not 100% certain how the page.tpl.php and node.tpl.php were originally set up in steven's version of the theme, but I created my own approximations based on my own experience with the phpTemplate system.

I didn't do anything to improve the theme - I just took the style.css and graphics from the drupal site and created the template pages.

If I had more time and wanted to create my own version of this theme I would:

1) Create two seperate style sheets and simplify them. The stylesheet for bluebeach is far more complex than it needs to be. There are so many 'nested' classes and id's that if you wanted to do some site wide changes to a common tag it would require serveral changes to the style sheet. (Stylesheets are there to reduce the number of changes that would be required to change the look of an entire site). I would create one sheet for basic styling information (text colours, backgrounds etc.) and a second for node specific attributes (layout/positioning and node specific images like rounded corners).

You can see a similar approach in my BeCircle theme.

2) Obviously create a whole new set of images that would go along with a different colour scheme. In all there are 43+ images used in the BlueBeach Theme - but that is required for all the rounded corners of the many different box, block, node and comment types in a drupal site. (assuming you want them all to be different).

If anyone is interested in looking at the page, node and block templates that I created to reproduce this theme leave a comment (that way I will get your e-mail address to send them to you). Please don't make a request if you just want to rip off the look for your own site. I want to respect the wishes of Dries and Steven - the look of drupal.org should stay the look of drupal.org. I don't want to annoy anyone. I just wanted to help those theme developers that wanted to see how something like this can be done.

Please note that I will not send along the stylesheet or the image files. Nor am I offering any tutorials on how to use these files. This is intended for theme developers that already know what they are doing. You may want to note the copyright notice on the original stylesheet. Also note that the code has not be beautified and does not conform to the drupal programming standards. (this was a quick hack)

/*
Bluebeach Styles,
© Steven Wittens.
 Feel free to learn new ideas from this, but please don't rip parts or the whole
 look and feel.
*/

andre