Posted by jdcreativity on October 29, 2008 at 3:15pm
Imagine there is the potential to put some resources into an "Access" theme. What sorts of considerations, ideas, caveats cross your mind? OMP has enough on the plate but John suggested I cross post to here and PEGspace.
Comments
Drop down menus
From a design perspective, I can't imagine a theme without drop down menus.
Getting there in Drupal 6 is a pain - nice menus or some custom jquery hack.
So, an access theme should have a nice clean drop down menu integration.
a standard for drop downs?
Does it matter that every center has a different main navbar? Or should they strive to have some similarities?
CCK for front page
OK, so this might not be theming - but this is part of what prompted the original post.
On the front page of the site have a 250x150 image and have that link to a story. I think many centers would like to have the ability to create their story and upload the picture and have the link between them be created automatically and all from the creation of a single user generated node. Is that a CCK challenge that has been addressed?
If I'm following you
If I'm following you correctly, you want every story on the front page to be linked from a 250x150 image. That's easy enough to do on the technical end, but user either need to crop the image so that the aspect ratio will result in 250x120 or the system can arbitrarily crop the image in the center, top, bottom... but that will likely result in several of the images looking bad.
Another downside of image based linking is that every story needs an image. So if I want a "story" about a major change to the server to appear on the homepage, I have to look for an image that some how conveys that change and make sure it's the right aspect ratio.
I like using IMCE in TinyMCE for publishing. IMCE can generate multiple image sizes from the same image with a max width or height. So if a user uploaded an image that was 300x50 it would be scaled 250x41.5. If you designate an image size for your front page in IMCE, users can use the appropriate size in their post and you can programmaticaly remove the larger image and add the frontpage size in the teaser for the story on the front page.
My 2¢ is to avoid creating a content type called something like "font page content" and instead use Drupal's "Promoted to front page" to allow the promotion of different content types to the front page. Then theme that display to create some consistency. The body and image of an event could then appear as a story AND on the front page, a blog as a user's blog AND on the front page, and even a show/video can be scheduled for playback on the air AND include text and by highlighted on the front page.
not stories, special projects
If you see our site http://www.medfield.tv - you see that it looks ugly at the moment. But beyond that, I uses graphics of a set size to link to special projects - sports, film festival, Medfield Day. These are not just stories and not published as often. I got stuck on this site using Panels on this site to accommodate these graphic do-hickies and now it's time for another solution. In showing the site to people at other facilities - people tend to like these small image on their front page.
Maybe the goal would be to save real estate and use this: http://drupaltherapy.com/node/70
using a carousel of images highlighting special projects of the organization - each image linking to a node describing the project.
Use imagefield
I tend to frown upon indiscriminately tossing images into the body of nodes. I think that, while you can't solve every case, you should take advantage of the power of CCK to split out key content pieces: like primary images for a node (if every node of a certain type is going to have a consistent kind of image in it, break it out into a CCK field).
Imagefield (http://drupal.org/project/imagefield) does a great job of giving you an CCK field into which you can explicitly declare and upload an image. You can also use ImageCache to automatically crop and scale that image, and something like Contemplate to theme it.
Using CCK to break out core content pieces also gives you flexibility to re-use those images in other contexts: Instead of showing the same boring old text teasers (which also can break if you're relying upon big images being in the node body), you can override a view and display only the images, cropped down into cute little squares, as a link back to the full article itself.
Contemplate (http://drupal.org/project/contemplate) is a (relatively, though not so much) way to easily retheme teasers and body nodes to place those CCK fields in innovative and consistent locations. (Though Drupal 6 makes creating a distinct node-{content-type}.tpl.php file pretty easy)
In my own designs, I usually design my teasers to live within Block Views, showing just the first few words of text and the title and image. The full node view I design for the single page view. I find this gives me some flexibility with design and layout, and ensures that I can keep my sidebars looking fresh and inviting and reduce my bounce rates.
in general the idea of a peg
in general the idea of a peg theme has been on my mind for some time. there are 2 major things i'd like to see integrated. good-looking tv schedules page and blocks. and a nice video integration piece.
of course, then my mind gets a little fuzzy because all of the above really involve both custom modules as well as some theme styling. some of the stuff i've been working on that started for cctv but that i'm now trying to customize include all of this. i've been working on generalizing the cctv stream player module and am really close to being finished, but one of my headaches is that to make it all come together, it's probably going to be necessary to either include or have folks download a theme that's specific to the stream player. one of the reasons for this is for GA tracking. we've found that stats can be misleading if every time a page is loaded it looks like video was watched. this is really not accurate. so instead we're using iframes which allows for the following:
so getting back to an actual peg-theme, one thing i would really like to see leveraged is the potential of Theme Settings API. That way different centers could easily customize, for example, colors of regions, location of things like nav bars and utility menus, width of regions, etc. most people are not going to have a css genius on staff, but could easily handle a page where they can customize some settings.