themes

I've always had a bit of a problem with the layout of my site.  For one, it had a green background.  For two, as much as I liked the bookmark, there were too many colors contrasting off each other.  But most importantly the theme did not reflect the title of the site - Stars in the Sky.  A few other content issues - that I would like to invite people to post their own opinionated blogs on the site, and that the site isn't solely to sell me - but to be informative and to a purpose.  So - with all of these things in mind, I've reduced the amount of content.  To find out about me, you need to go to the "About" page.  But for all other things - there are direct links off the main page.  Colors are a splash of gold with lots of light and a white background.

In other news: Drupal 7 - Alpha has been released!  I will be slowly migrating everything to a new D7 site over the next while. 

December 3rd - Installed D7 with the goal of upgrading the ahasaetharu.net site and Scor's Openspring.net site. 

• USABILITY: Found my first snag when using the admin interface - clicking on links takes me to their respective pages, but I lose my place and have to find the same admin interface again.  Found an issue on drupal.org to add my input to - hopefully will be something fixed in the final release.
• FIELDS: Second snag when creating a multi-value field (Ingredients for recipes which are entered as separate text items) - have to play around and remove and recreate the field until I have my desired form element - in this case a text field with unlimited 'add another's.
• THEMING: Downloaded some theme files notably Zen for my site and Moleskin for Scor's.  In the process of working my theme into the new Zen layout. 

December 4th - continuation of the same

• THEMING: Snagged in being unable to upload personalized logo and favicon.  Found the patch to fix it.  Downloaded the themes I require in 7.x format (Basic & Zen).  Now trying to figure out how to get them to do what I want. Some success with scor's site - need to work on mine.
• Getting color palette from www.colorhunter.com using logo images

December 5th - Decided to post this as this will be a continuing saga most like (until the official release date!)

• Found the "user settings" page to disable anonymous user account set up - by default Drupal 7 sites are open for user id creation by the public. 

To see my progress to date:  http://scor.ahasaetharu.net (openspring.net) and http://dcor.ahasaetharu.net (ahasaetharu.net)!

I started by looking at jQuery UI to see what can be done with jQuery.  Then I had the problem of trying to figure out how to incorporate these into my website.  I came across an excellent post by Sean Buscay titled "Where and How to Start using jQuery to Enhance your Drupal Site (jQuery Mini-series Part 3 of 3)".  

Then I managed to get my head around a few modules (jcarousel, views carousel, jquery_ui, views accordion) and to add some new features to my website. 

• To Browse all sites (added in the bottom right corner of the page)
• A recipe page (added to the menu above)

So that's quite a bit of practice for one day (combined with the usual holiday stuff associated with being with my husband's family and it being a Sunday and all!)

In France for another week - all documents for entering the US have been obtained and we're good to go.  I'm dreading the re-shuffle of things in our bags to ensure that the weight is all within the requirments of Iceland Air. 

For the moment, we're working diligently on minor projects (and in Steph's case major ones as the RDF in Drupal 7.x core does not come lightly).  I've taken the time to update all the websites I have in my keeping with the latest and greatest versions of Drupal and respective modules being used.  I've also re-themed my site to be a little more flexible and to have a cleaner layout.  This was done by combining the images from Theme 008 with the functionality of Blog Grail. I'm also tinkering with jQuery and css to teach myself more about how they can used.

I'm quite proud of myself that I've managed to update my private blog with a hot-wired theme to look like the Ahasaetharu.net website.