Mar
04
2012
at 7:59pm
If you’ve attempted to add color module support to your Drupal theme, you’ve probably found the methods to be confusing, to say the least. I don’t understand this well enough to write a full tutorial, but I can offer a few tips:
- There are two main tasks in implementing the Color module: getting the preview in the theme settings to work and then getting those colours to apply on the actual site. Implementation instructions tend not to differentiate between the two, which adds to the confusion.
- You must have colour options called “text” and “links”. (see issue #693504 for some background on this). That issue seems to indicate that “base” is required as well but I haven’t found that to be the case. This means that you must have at least two optional colours in your theme (and probably three if you want to do more than just text and links!).
- There are two methods for implementing the preview in the theme settings. One is the (incredibly confusing) sliced image method described in the Drupal.org documentation, and used in the Garland theme. The other uses a rough html/css mock-up instead of images, as demonstrated in Bartik. I chose the latter.
- If you don’t want to use the gradient option in your theme, you have to leave the array empty in your color.inc, otherwise you get PHP errors. Just like this:
'gradients' => array(),
- If you’re getting PHP errors about an “Undefined index”, it may be because of either point 2 or point 4, above.
I have found the Adding color module support to your theme in Drupal 7 tutorial by James Tombs to be particularly helpful. It describes the html/css method implemented in Bartik.
Posted in Drupal
Aug
14
2011
at 12:54pm
In my last post I offered a critique of the (not-so) new University of Waterloo home page. The next question is, how do these things happen?
Before I get started, I’d like to be clear that the points offered up in this post are gross generalizations, and certainly wouldn’t apply to all universities. These are just some of the issues I experienced at Waterloo—there are others that I won’t go into. I’m sure people who work at UW or other universities can think of additional factors to add. These points are also referencing the home page, although most of the factors listed apply to the rest of the web space as well.
Those of you who are familiar with web design in higher ed have surely seen the infamous venn diagram cartoon from xkcd:
When this was originally posted I remember seeing some talk about “web managers” not understanding usability. At least in my experience (as a former university web manager), that’s not the case at all. There are several problems at the root of this: Read more…
Posted in Design, Usability, Web Culture
Jul
27
2011
at 11:07pm
I’ve recently come across blog posts from earlier this year about redesigning on spec, and redesign and problem solving. This is timely, because I’ve been working on this post about the uWaterloo web redesign for some time now. I think this is a case where there was a lot of “design” done for the sake of impact without actually solving problems. Now that I don’t work there anymore, I’m free to make some honest comments it. How refreshing!
Until recently I was the “web manager” for the central Communications department. I was on maternity leave for most of the redesign process, but I did make some plans for it before I left (that weren’t used, to my knowledge), and worked intimately with the delivered designs after I got back. There are some things I really like about it, and some things I really don’t. I’m going to focus on the home page here, since I think that’s what where a lot of problems are. The other areas are okay, particularly some of the content and information architecture.
I’m going to refer to Jared Spool’s wisdom throughout this article. I attended his workshop on “Designing for Content-Rich Sites” at DrupalCon in March, I think his work is very relevant here. Read more…
Posted in Design, Usability
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