Styles can be defined in a couple of different places. The major ones are:

1) misc/drupal.css - LOTS of stuff here that in all liklihood you won't need to edit much if at all. 2) themes/mytheme/style.css - The styles specific to that theme. 3) modules/mymodule/module.css - A few modules add their own styles, which usually are just positional. You shouldn't need to play with them for now.

Most of what you need is in #2. The overall page design and such will be defined in page.tpl.php (If it's a phptemplate theme) or in whatever the page template file is for tha theme. I would recommend looking at

- themes/mytheme/page.tpl.php - themes/mytheme/style.css - View the page in a browser and do view-source (or view-formatted-source with the right Firefox plugin)

Odds are those should cover any color and general layout you need to do.

Cheers.

You may want to look at this, a drupal theme generator. Works well and is easy to understand and use. http://drupal.org/node/43449

Please advise on what needs to be known or done when changing the look of a site. I've been playing with one theme and have a good reason to believe that I'm missing something. I started with fancy style and hoping that it wouldn't be that difficult as it appears that style.css is the file that needs to be editted. as the main style sheet.

I'm just trying to change the font colors and background colors for

the main content area. So, in style.css I see any number of labelled class and ids. Matching them up with something in the php and later xhtml file is not at all clear to me. Where is such and such class or id being used?

I'm just taking a shot in the dark, thinking, "well, maybe this style (class or id) goes with this text on the web page. Does that make sense, what I'm trying to describe about my confusion and the conviction that I'm missing some information somehow.

I really didn't want it to be this complicated and it didn't seem like, from the feedback I got, that it would be this difficult.

The site in question is http://ghwilliamscollaborative.com It is obvious that the site has problems with the styles for the site. Please advise. Bruce "Boerland, Bert" bert.boerland@getronics.com wrote: -----Original Message----- From: support-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces@drupal.org]On Behalf Of Bruce

...

They want to see a black background directly around the image/photograph, to bring out the picture in terms of how they like it.

All drupal themes use CSS. It is trival to change the colors. Just look at the different CSS files for a theme. Less trivial to make a nice colorscheme let alone to come up with a nice theme. Buts just changing the background color would be a no brainer. -- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Word Salad Poetry Magazine - join us online at: http://wordsalad.net/ and also -> Check out the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing Street Exposure - Street Newspaper http://wordsalad.net/StreetExposure/ Bruce Whealton - Webmaster/Designer/publisher/Writer http://trianglewebservices.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]

On 01/04/06, Bruce Whealton brucewhealton@yahoo.com wrote:

Please advise on what needs to be known or done when changing the look of a site. I've been playing with one theme and have a good reason to believe that I'm missing something. I started with fancy style and hoping that it wouldn't be that difficult as it appears that style.css is the file that needs to be editted. as the main style sheet.

You should only really need to edit the themes stylesheet. That stylesheet can pretty much override any other styles in Drupal (it is imported last).

You don't mention (or at least I didn't see it mentioned) how much you know about CSS. You'll need to have a fairly good understanding of selectors and the 'cascade' or inheritance in stylesheets.

The one thing I absolutely recommend as a must have is using Firefox and its Web Developer extension to dig into the page and highlight blocks ids classes etc etc. You can even use it to try altering the CSS on the fly to see whether or not your are changing the right bits.

-- Cheers Anton

Hi, Can anyone recommend a very easy to use theme for customizing. Basically I just need to get a black background and 2 or 3 columns. It seems like three columns works better than 2 even when I only need 2 columns in my display. Using a 2 column theme will often push content down to the bottom of the page when you want it up top. I looked a argeebee as I stated to be easy but it sure isn't working out as easy as I had so hoped it would. They want a front page which will show the images from their projects. So, I started with a home page being one of the gallery pages. It seems like the book feature might work better as I can create columns across the page. Anyway, an easy theme to just get the main content area black. No borders aroudn blocks or anything. Just something that would be very easy to customize in this way, like changing the background of the main content area without touching the rest. Still, things are not always easy even with that as the main content area, includes fields where one must enter content into the field and it's not easy to figure out which style class, or id is controlling text on a form page. bruce

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Word Salad Poetry Magazine - join us online at: http://wordsalad.net/ and also -> Check out the Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing Street Exposure - Street Newspaper http://wordsalad.net/StreetExposure/ Bruce Whealton - Webmaster/Designer/publisher/Writer http://trianglewebservices.com/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That's pretty close to getting there. It only effected the node content area. It didn't effect the Submit Story page. How did you go about finding the particular class or in this case classes that needed to be changed? From the view of source? Thanks, Bruce

Jason Flatt drupal@oadae.net wrote: On Sunday 02 April 2006 09:22 am, Bruce Whealton wrote:

Hi, Can anyone recommend a very easy to use theme for customizing. Basically I just need to get a black background and 2 or 3 columns. It seems like three columns works better than 2 even when I only need 2 columns in my display. Using a 2 column theme will often push content down to the bottom of the page when you want it up top. I looked a argeebee as I stated to be easy but it sure isn't working out as easy as I had so hoped it would. They want a front page which will show the images from their projects. So, I started with a home page being one of the gallery pages. It seems like the book feature might work better as I can create columns across the page. Anyway, an easy theme to just get the main content area black. No borders aroudn blocks or anything. Just something that would be very easy to customize in this way, like changing the background of the main content area without touching the rest. Still, things are not always easy even with that as the main content area, includes fields where one must enter content into the field and it's not easy to figure out which style class, or id is controlling text on a form page. bruce

You could try adding something like the following to about line 27 of the styles.css file: .node .content {background-color: #000;}

That will make the background of only the node's content black (not the "submitted by", etc.).

This will make the entire node's background black: .node {background-color: #000;}

Both of those will affect all nodes, however, not just images.

There may be a better class or id to use, but I'm not at all familiar w/the gallery, and there wasn't anything obvious to my in my cursory glance.

I don't know if this can be done as is, or with some css editing. I think bluemarine is a good one to use for customization, as stated below. But, I want to try to get the site to open on the image galleries. But, instead of opening with one image across and one row per image gallery, can I have the content area display images like they appear when you select an image gallery itself? In this case, the images go across, more than one column across? What style sheet would cover things like that?

Also, if one wants to change the background and font colors on a particular page, would it be best to just do view source when displaying that page to get an idea which styles are being used? And if a change is needed, by editing style.css I can be sure that I'll be overriding any styles that might be defined elsewhere, because style.css is loaded last? Thanks, Bruce

Jason Flatt drupal@oadae.net wrote: On Sunday 02 April 2006 11:03 am, Bruce Whealton wrote:

That's pretty close to getting there. It only effected the node content area. It didn't effect the Submit Story page. How did you go about finding the particular class or in this case classes that needed to be changed? From the view of source? Thanks, Bruce

I looked in the styles.css for blumarine and experiminted with it first. I actually already had a clue on what to look for, since I've been creating a new theme for a new site. Mostly, I have a test site with a few common themes installed, and additional themes that appear to do what I want, as I need them, then I experiment until I find what I want. The three I use most are bluemarine, box_grey and argeebee, in that order.

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 07:10 am, Bruce Whealton wrote:

Hi all, I wanted to find out if there is a way to remove the login box from the page even for visitors. I wouldn't mind a simple link to login page on the menu.

http://drupal.org/node/13777 http://drupal.org/node/37375

Second, remove the code of "submitted by," how do I remove that?

http://drupal.org/node/32050

  Bruce

You know, Bruce, most of the questions you have been asking can be found in the handbooks on drupal.org. You really should try reading through them.

http://drupal.org/handbooks

On Tuesday 04 April 2006 08:57 pm, Lists wrote:

"Jason Flatt" wrote:

...

most of the questions you have been asking can be found in the handbooks on drupal.org. You really should try reading through them.

I'm not sure any human could 'read through' those materials. They are quite scattered across "books", "projects", "issues", "forums" and so on and so forth.

I agree that it is difficult to wade through all the information that is available there, but I was only pointing to the books, if you will notice the links. I would not at all suggest searching through the all the projects, issues and forums. I myself prefer the mail list, but I also search the handbooks before asking questions. Sometimes I miss the answer in the books, but more frequently, I save an e-mail to the lists.

RTFM is more and more a thing of the past, since there are fewer and fewer M's to R for us F'ers. ;)

-- gary

On Sunday 02 April 2006 10:52 am, Bruce Whealton wrote:

I understand CSS and how they cascade. It helps to know now, that the theme stylesheet is imported last, so it will override all that came before.

I was looking at Wireframe and it seems to work without styles, maybe. Not that styles are bad. I can use them and know how to do so. The problem is trying to figure out (1) which style sheet is causing a particular color, font, etc. to appear at any one point and (2) how to change the display in one area without destroying how things look in a different area, like on a different page. Like, when a black background is great against the photographs but when you use the same background on forms with a dark text font color then you can't see anything. So then I'm trying to figure out how to change such and such text, specifically that text from among the large number of classes and ids. Bruce

Sometimes you need to look in drupal.css or the source of the modules, which may include their own .css file. In the .module files, look for <div> statements that have specific class or id settings. Usually they are fairly predefined tags, but the particular theme you are using may not make use of them. I did a quick search for them in the gallery module, but didn't see anything.