I recently launched the updated version of the Himpressive theme for Himerus.com, entitled Himpressive Reloaded. I wanted to put up a short post on what this new site/theme has to offer, and how I plan to extend it in the future.

The Base Theme

The base theme is based on the 960gs system, and using the ninesixty theme as the parent theme. I have personally never had much luck with using parent themes in Drupal. The ever popular Zen theme has never worked well for me, I was always wasting time searching for "what is controlling this" in the parent theme rather than writing the code for my own theme. With that in mind, I always ended up just taking some contributed theme, wiping the CSS out completely, and starting fron scratch. A few times, I have taken one of my previous personal or client sites, and used the theme from that project as the "jumping off point" on a new project.

Recently at work, there was a discussion regarding this very issue, and what should be used as the base theme we start all of our work from. The conversation started off with just a couple of people chatting about it, then eventually, every engineer, themer, and designer was in on the conversation throwing in related information. It was at this point I decided to jump in and really give the 960gs system a valid attempt at working on my own site. This new theme was still in the Photoshop phase, and I have used the 960gs photoshop template for a long time now, even if I wasn't incorporating it into my HTML/CSS it was an invaluable tool able to help me quickly layout a framework for the site in Photoshop that would translate well to the web, even if I was hand coding the regions.

With 960gs in place to handle the layout, I wanted to really also be able to dig into the Acquia Marina theme created by Top Notch Themes and the powerful settings that are available in the theme settings. With that in mind, the Acquia Marina theme was used as a base for feature set. However, many of the default features implemented in Acquia Marina are not currently being implemented by the theme.

The Internet Explorer issue

I have always had issues with IE6 layouts, and as the last year has gone on, I have more and more issues with even IE7. I fear that in another 10 years, as themers, we will be bitching about the same thing we are now regarding IE6. I have never cared on my own sites if it worked in IE6, but now IE7 gives me the same issue, and oddly enough, a rendering issue EXACTLY like what was happnening in Internet Explorer was happening in Opera too.

My issue was how do I represent the data to those users without spending countless hours making this theme compatible for every browser when I really could care less about those users? In my humble personal opinion, the visitors to my site are designers, developers and engineers, and if those people are using Internet Explorer for anything other than testing... well... whatever.

With that in mind, I found the SwitchTheme module on Drupal. The module was first discovered so that I could allow users to switch between the Fluid and default 960gs layouts without having to register or visit their profile settings in order to make it happen. It is being used for the feature in the upper right or upper left sidebar (depending on layout) The latest DEV version (As of the date of this post) of the module integrates the browscap module to determine the browser of the user, and depending on the settings provided by the admin, you may also choose to enable a different theme for different browsers. So, for those of you using or visiting the site in IE (ANY VERSION) or Opera, you will recieve the Garland theme that comes default with Drupal.

What still needs to happen

I've decided to go ahead and implement the "beta" version of this theme for now live on the site. There are still a handful of issues that need to be addressed, and fixed for the theme to be a bit more "perfected". As we all know, true perfection is never accomplished without a billion hours invested. We always have "just that one more" thing that can make it better. I always seem to get personally stuck in that cycle, and can never be truly satasfied with my work. With that in mind here is a short list of what I still need to do here to get the Himpressive Reloaded theme finished.

• Fix the layout with IE7, IE8 and Opera
  • All three of these browsers have horrible rendering issues with this theme at the moment. IE6 will not be supported at ANY time, as the majority of the theme is using transparent PNG images, and I will not bother with the pngfix options avaialbe for those users.
• Fix the main area wrapper
  • There are many areas where "double wrapping" are occuring currently. This is because during the creation of the theme, I had issue with the proper way to correctly wrap both the nodes (on multi-node displays), the blocks, and the page itself (on single node & utility pages) with the style you see here. There are many areas (Search results, Comment pages, and various other places) where the outer page wrapper is getting the region style, AND the content inside of it is also getting the style. While it doesn't look "horrible", it is annoyting, and not "perfect"
• Implement more default menu placements
  • I still need to implement footer regions and header region navigation, as well as some options for the sidebar as well.
• Implement more of the features available in Acquia Marina
  • As mentioned above, I still need to incorporate many of the features available to the Acquia Marina users here as well.
• Implement the color module.
  • The entire color of this theme is controled by the background gradient/color currently. I need to do some research on the color module which I have never used on any of my themes. With the color module, it would be possible to completely recolor the site simply by changing two colors.

Will it be contributed?

While it has been my goal with the last couple of themes I developed for this site to have them contributed back to the community, I have never quite completed that goal. Again, however, that is my goal with this theme once many of the features mentioned above are solved, and the layout has a bit more flexibility for more situations that just my own personal blog.

It is my greatest hope though to contribute a theme that will be useful and used by both new users to drupal using it for a decent theme for their site, and for experienced users that like the flexibility of the layout. As long as other work doesn't pull me too far away from improving the theme here for this blog, I will eventually have it released on Drupal.org.