Troopers Get Bacta – A Drupal 6 Theme Update

I guess it wasn’t too long before I needed to fix up a few things with my Trooper theme. This will be a short post, but for any of you that tried it there are a few things to note about the theme. What prompted all this was the death of my hard drive in my laptop. I got a new one, but of course I had to completely re-build everything. I did the “freezer trick” with my drive and I was able to pull off most of my data – many thanks to the almighty for that 🙂

Here’s a screen capture of the current theme:

When you install this theme there are a few things you need to do:

1. After installing it the layout will be a little funky until you add the custom logo from the config screen. The logo is in the images folder and is called troopers_logo.jpg. Once that is added the layout should be correct. I found another glitch with IE 7. The fix is to make a change to a tag in the troopers.css file to the main-inner tag adding some padding:

#main-inner
{
padding: 0px 1px 0px 0px;
}

Then you can take a bit out of the contentBreak tag:

#contentBreak{
background-color: #9199A4;
width: 0px;
}

The style will now display properly in IE7 and FF2

I’ve made a number of other tweaks to various minor settings and I’ve uncovered a few other bugs in my skin:

1. If you enable Login with OpenId you will see a funky icon in the nav area. I notice this in many Drupal 6 themes. I edited the tags for this so that it now displays as a regular list-item.
2. With zen there are some funky extra features in the config screen. Well my skin either has a bug or I screwed up something. You need to turn off the “show block editing on hover” crap or you will get weird hover crap showing up. I guess I ‘ll look into that at some point .
3. If you look at the source for an aggregator feed then the HTMl page will get very very wide – some kind of wrapping issue.
4. My skin assumes you will always want a left and right sidebar so if you do not configure this then it gets funky. The left sidebar looks funny when your site is new because it is too short. Well yeah – I guess I could “do something” like always make it some height, but I always put more content/modules on there anyway.
5. I tweaked the footer a bit to make it smaller and re-align the text.

Below is the complete theme. I think I have all the bugs out of it. Enjoy.

troopers theme

I’m also looking into a couple of other starting themes that might be easier to deal with than Zen. Zen has a lot of extras stuff that you really don’t need. Perhaps a different theme would make for a better starting point for making a pure CSS/XHTML theme.