Hello!
I am currently considering changing our current Joomla Church website to Drupal due to the better access control and the great support from the Geeks and God Podcast.
Before I make the move i'm getting familiar with Drupal, and particuarly want to make a custom template.
Here is a mockup of a design I wanted to turn into a template with Joomla, but was never able to.
I was wondering if anyone could offer some advice on:
- Opinions on the actual design and how effective it would be for a church website
- How easy it will be to turn this into a Drupal Theme
- I would like the bottom three boxes to appear only on some pages, ie: when a bock is applied to them. How can I acheive this?
I have never made a proper Drupal theme before, only mucked around with editing some css files in others. I think I have the basic layout acheived in the page.tpl.php file so far, but some bits I am not sure how to go about making include:
- the top navigation
- the sidebar naviagtion
- and the three boxes mentioned above
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Multiple Files
Two design things to think about...
1) This is a lot of green.
2) It doesn't feel like there is enough white space. (this is totally subjective)
As for blocks, you can choose what pages they are on by listing paths, parts or paths, and even php written logic to have then show up or not show up. That's part of the beauty of blocks.
Also, the page.tpl.php file holds some of the theming. It holds the shell of the page. The parts of the page like nodes, blocks, etc. are themed by other .tpl.php files.
To display the primary links one would usually use something like this in their page.tpl.php file:
<?phpprint theme('links', $primary_links);
?>
For the three boxes, I'd do them as blocks in a region and then use CSS to move them from being stacked to being next to each others.
The sidebar navigation is usually done by having a sidebar region and a menu that you put in that region as a block.
Now, there are a lot of drupalism in this. Please ask questions where I was too drupal.
Matt Farina
Geeks and God Co-Host
www.innovatingtomorrow.net
www.mattfarina.com
Thanks
Sorry, I started this thread but accidently wasn't signed in!
I think I'll get rid of some of the green - good point.
How would I style the actual menu? where is this done?
Thanks for your response
Paul Vaartjes