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

[Boris Mann]

Steven:

Another great write-up that is trapped in drupal-docs/drupal-dev.  
This is the kind of thing that I was talking about would make a great  
post for the Best Practices category of story posts.

I would call this "How to start making your Drupal-powered site kick  
(graphical) ass".

On 30-May-05, at 9:40 PM, Steven Wittens wrote:

> 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.

--
Boris Mann
http://www.bmannconsulting.com