After re-reading my earlier post, which was in general agreement with Pilgrim and Tomayko's minimalism, I decided to practise what I had preached and write a minimalist theme implementing some of the applications of the principles of minimalism.
It's called Straight Edge, and I've switched to it today. Once I've finished alpha-testing it I'll write more about it, and offer it for download if anyone's interested.
As promised, I'm releasing the Straight Edge theme used on this blog under GPL2.
There's a brief README.txt in the zipped archive linked above, but the theme's main features are:
I'm typing this from Google Chrome. Since it was released almost two weeks ago I've wanted to blog about it, but have been mostly hampered by no easy access to Vista or XP.
Here's a basic rule of account security: you should never give your login details on website X, to a form on website Y. And here's a basic rule of etiquette: if you're running website Y, you should never ask people for their login details on website X.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation is quoted by the mainstream media all the time, such is the impact of the studies and publications it funds, produces and reports on.
I've never been completely happy with this spindly and slightly confusing diagram from the Django Book, ever since it appeared the first edition.
Hierarchical grid comes next. And some proper design chops, maybe.
In the spirit of getting it out there, I've now begun implementing a columnar grid system on my site. As discussed in Mark Boulton's excellent talk at DrupalCon Paris 2009, and reported briefly in my live notes from the conference. such grid systems are a basic underpinning of consistency and visual clarity on a site. You start at the grid, then decide how your actual page elements are going to fit into it.
Panels and panes are like regions and blocks, done properly if a bit madly
When finished this site will implement several different layouts: blogposts, "static" pages, short "nuggets", blog archives, taxonomy listing and probably a bespoke front page. Although these will all have the same underlying seven-column layout, that can still present some problems that are usually solved in Drupal with many different theme files and a lot of "regions" in which you can put "blocks" of content.
