My Drupal Blog

Neptune - A New Zen Sub-theme

Laurence — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:10:45 +0000

A couple of weeks ago now I released the 1.0 version of Neptune, a new Zen 7.x-5.x sub-theme. Since then I've fixed and added a number of bits and today created a recommended 1.1 release. You can see the theme in action at the demo site.

Key features include:

Responsive design
HTML5 markup
Sass/Compass integration
Single column, configurable width layout
Mobile friendly mini nav
Google web fonts (Montserrat for titles and Istok Web for all other text)
Overlapping triangle thing

My Drupal Blog - Case Study (Upgrade, Redesign, HTML5, Responsive)

Laurence — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:14:06 +0000

I recently upgraded My Drupal Blog from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 and implemented a newly designed and HTML5 based responsive theme.

This case study details the processes involved.

Embed Drupal Views Using PHP

Laurence — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:02:27 +0000

When theming Drupal and wanting to output a view there are occasions where using a view display (e.g. a page, or a block - perhaps placed within a custom region ;-) ), or using Views Attach will not suffice.

Instead, you can embed a view using the following PHP snippet:
(NOTE: you'll need to have the core PHP input filter enabled if embedding in a node body)

<?php
$view = views_get_view('VIEWNAME');
print $view->preview('default');
?>

or, if you need to use an argument with the view:

<?php
$args = array(ARGUMENTS);
$view = views_get_view('VIEWNAME');
print $view->preview('default', $args);
?>

Help Test The New Drupal.org Theme

Laurence — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 11:17:11 +0000

Just passing along this call for testing of the new Drupal.org theme - How to verify Mark Bolton’s mockups against the staging site - which I saw in my feed reader this morning. Seems like readers of this blog would be the perfect candidates :)

Drupal Theming + jQuery Basics (inc. Drupal Behaviors)

Laurence — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:34:28 +0000

In this tutorial you'll see how to implement a toggling effect using jQuery within your Drupal theme whilst utilising Drupal behaviors.

The finished effect can be seen in this Drupal jQuery demo.

The toggle is achieved via a two-step process:

Step 1 - add content and markup to a node
Step 2 - implement jQuery, utilising Drupal behaviors, which will enable the toggling to work

Truncate A Drupal View Node Title

Laurence — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:24:23 +0000

UPDATE

It appears that I missed the very obvious solution to this problem (!) which, as pointed out by a couple of commenters, is to use the ‘Trim this field to a maximum length’ option within the settings for the node title field.

I’ll leave this post in place as I think it still serves as a useful guide on how to create template override files for views, but please be advised that for implementing truncation of a views node title it is easier to:

navigate to the view's 'Edit view viewname' page (/admin/build/views/edit/viewname) and click the ‘Node: Title' link
check the ‘Trim this field to a maximum length’ checkbox, and adjust the settings as required

Creating Custom Regions In Drupal 6 Themes

Laurence — Thu, 28 May 2009 18:57:22 +0000

Previously, I covered the topic of creating custom regions in Drupal 5 themes. However, Drupal 6 introduced a new process for creating custom regions in themes and it is still one of the topics people ask about most frequently.

So, here's a tutorial on how to create custom regions in your Drupal 6 themes. In this example I will use the Garland theme, and insert a new region called 'Uber content', which I'll position above everything in the main content area.

It's basically a two-step process:

step 1 - define the custom region in your theme's .info file
step 2 - insert some PHP in your theme's page.tpl.php file wherever you would like the new region to appear

Using PHP In Your Drupal Theme's Footer

Laurence — Sun, 17 May 2009 11:43:51 +0000

The problem:
Drupal’s default 'Footer message' area (to which you can add content via the admin section - Administer > Site configuration > Site information) will not parse PHP.

If, for example, you add a copyright message to your footer message area such as "© Copyright 2009" it'll be fine until the New Year begins and you have to go in and manually change it to "© Copyright 2010". So, instead, it would be great if you could handle the date dynamically using the following PHP code (see http://php.net/date for further PHP date details):

However, try adding that to the default 'Footer message' area and it will simply output the entirety of the code as text, ignoring the PHP tags.

So, what to do?

Solution 1:
Create a block (admin/build/block/add) containing the code, set its input format to PHP, and then place that block in the footer region via the main blocks settings page (admin/build/block). Crazy simple.

My Drupal Blog RSS Feeds Updated

Laurence — Fri, 01 May 2009 12:49:16 +0000

Just a quick note to say that the My Drupal Blog RSS feeds have been updated.

The local URLs are still the same:
Posts - http://mydrupalblog.lhmdesign.com/rss.xml
Comments - http://mydrupalblog.lhmdesign.com/crss

Been A While!

Laurence — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 11:10:05 +0000

Work, work, and more work have meant that I’ve rather neglected this blog as of late. But no more! Content is a-comin’ (slowly ;) ).