New Theme & Drupal

So we wanted to move the site over to Drupal (our CMS that runs this site) 4.7 from 4.6, because the new Store module is way nifty and it only works with 4.7. Plus 4.7 in general has some great new stuff, biggest for us is the better theming. 4.6 could only have a two or three column layout, and you could only put stuff (blocks, in Drupal terms) into the right or left columns with a center column devoted to posts, pages, that sort of thing. Pretty limiting. 4.7 allows you to put anything into any space, and if your Theme supports it, you can have four columns or a non-column based layout altogether. Way cool!

However, our old theme didn't work in 4.7. This is due to the fact that the new themeing stuff is based upon a different engine. Before in 4.6 the default was xhtml-driven, and our old theme used that. Now, the default is PHP-based. You can use the old engine with 4.7 if you want to, you're not forced to update, but we had some issues with the old theme anyways so we figured we'd just start over.

So what we did is something similar to before, namely we picked a theme that was close to what we wanted. Then we renamed it, renamed it's references in the .css and it's PHP files, and simply changed the widths, margins, padding, and colors of things to our liking. We hope it's to your liking as well! This theme should be much faster and easier to read than the old one. Lesson learned: don't use a lot of CSS hacks in your Drupal theme unless you're a web guru. Keep it simple!