[drupal-docs] An example of awesome theme documentation... care of WP

[Steven Wittens]

Chris Messina wrote:

>The depth of information on this one topic -- which is arguably one of
>the most important for bloggers since it addresses the most visual and
>personalizable aspects of a site -- is fantastic. From the code
>snippets to the visual aids... It really seems like this is the depth
>of information that should be available for each aspect of Drupal.
>
>http://codex.wordpress.org/Designing_Headers
>  
>
I agree with Chris that something similar would be excellent for 
Drupal... for the sites list in the FSM ad, I had to look at hundreds of 
Drupal sites today. Most of them completely fail to grab your attention, 
and are just a list of news posts with nothing to guide new visitors. 
Which is probably also the reason why most of them never seem to take 
off properly, or burn out after a while.

At the very least, each site should have a visible mission statement 
that is clear, simple and to the point. "FunkyTomatoes is an online 
community of ketchup lovers. Join us to discuss all things that are 
ketchup-related!". All Drupal themes support this and it is turned on by 
default, so this is an easy enhancement. The mission statement can 
contain HTML, so linking to more extensive introduction pages should be 
encouraged.

Another important part of Drupal page design is placement of blocks and 
links. Often the important blocks are tucked away at the bottom, while 
navigation links in the header tend to be vague.

Finally, a lot of people either don't seem to realize that a site should 
be uncluttered and concise, or (more likely) they don't know how to 
achieve this with Drupal. We could teach people how to better control 
the appearance of their page with the theme toggles (disable "submitted 
by" if it isn't relevant) or how to disable menu items.

If we can have such "Tips for your Drupal site", the quality of the 
average Drupal site should go up dramatically.

In extremis, we could even start creating some simple copy/pastable CSS 
snippets for simple things, though of course they tend to be 
theme-specific. Due to the variety of layouts used, something as simple 
as "#sidebar-right { font-size: 90%; }" won't work everywhere.

Steven Wittens