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

Drupal Theme

For those wanting to see the guts behind becircle.com (which is still in beta BTW) - I am making the following zip available. This is a phptemplate theme.

Download file

The theme and the site aren't 100% at this moment, but are being updated on a regular basis. The main issues remaining with the theme are how some of the administration features that still use tables show up.

I hope this is of some use to other drupal developers working towards a tabless future.

andre

p.s. Please do not steal the look of the BeCircle site - I retain the copyright on the stylesheets. I can't really stop you from stealing it if you are hell bent on doing so, but please respect my wishes. I am providing this as a resource to drupal theme developers.

Holy Smokes

With several recent victories under their belts - the league of extraordinary anti smoking groups has now gone after cars.

No Smoking in Cars with Kids (another source)

In a statement a leader of the group said, "Now that we have effectively controlled every public aspect of a smoker's life, we will not sleep until their private lives are under our control as well."

Animal rights groups have jumped on the bandwagon saying that the suggested ban should include cars with pets too.

A secret internal memo was leaked to the press outlining the groups plan...

• No smoking in cars with kids (check)


• No smoking in cars with non smokers


• No smoking in homes with kids


• No smoking in homes with non smokers


• No smoking anywhere - at any time - ever!

It is interesting to note the last line of the document that reads "mooohooo haaaa haaaa haa," which some have interpreted as "an evil laugh."

The minister of finance was reached for comment and he said, "I have no idea what we are going to do without all that lost [tax] revenue if people butt out for good. Why do you think we've kept this known killer legal for so many years?"

A person on the street commented, "Well, if all these measures went through and everyone quit at the same time you would have the grumpiest nation on the planet for 72-96 hours. It would be chaos!" She did conceded that after that initial 72-96 hour period the nation would likely feel a lot better; suddenly develop a superiority complex; and immediately begin reminding other smoking nations "how gross" smoking is and that if we can quit there is no reasons they couldn't as well.

andre

Spoke too soon 1and1 did go down for me

Yeah I spoke too soon.

Just as I'm in the middle of an important meeting where somebody wants to see my newly launched site (even though its just in beta), I go to the site and find it down...

I did some troubleshooting for a minute and discovered that it was likely a DNS issue at 1and1.

How embarassing... Luckily by the end of the meeting I encouraged us to look at the site again... and it was back up and running.

Good thing it wasn't a sales meeting!!! I still wouldn't have been that pissed off - after all shit happens... and I am paying $0 for what has been thusfar good hosting.

If the problem persists though, 1and1 will lose my support...

andre

1and1 down???

Well, you know what they say, "sometimes you get what you pay for."

I am with 1and1 hosting... and besides the once in a blue moon glitch, I haven't had any problems... In my case I am on their free hosting for 3 years deal - so even if there was a problem I wouldn't have too much to complain about...

that said however, if you do happen to be paying for hosting and all of a sudden things go down that can be a real pissoff... Especially if its on a stand-alone machine... (you can't toss your hands in the air and say 'its all par for the course when you have 100 people on 1 machine where any one of them could take it down with some baddly written script').

Sorry to hear that things were down... Glad to know that there is a place where we can all let eachother know about problems... i.e. our blogs.

Now for something completely different... I've had some experience driving in a round-about... mainly on the east coast and a couple of intersections right here at home... but I think this would drive me insane....

andre

DEREK your site and or email is down

I find it funny that I am notifying someone that their site and or e-mail is down at the moment.

But how do you get in touch with someone when their mail and site are down... and you don't want to pester them with a phone call (especially not at 6:30 in the morning).

The answer. Tell the whole world. I know that my site is on derek's news reader - so if he decides to take a break from work and do some reading he will catch this message.

Be Circle

Be Circle is nearly ready to launch! Very exciting stuff.

andre