CivicActions

Have you ever wondered what a "themer" actually does? How are they different to a designer and a developer? In it's simplest sense a themere takes a flat static image, the design, provided by the designer, and a mostly-functional but ugly site, provided by a developer, and makes the ugly site look pretty like the designer wants it.

This timelapse by Matthew Buchanan of the theming of nzmusicmonth.co.nz sums up that process:

I would never use a drupal module or javascript to fix IE6 suckiness with transparency in 24-bit PNGs.

After battling IE6 and image transparency on many sites I always do one of three things when tackling this issue:

1. Firstly, if only binary transparency is required, I use an 8-bit PNG file. Binary transparency means that each pixel is either transparent xor colored (but not both, hence 'xor' for the eXclusive-or. When can we add 'xor' to the English dictionary?). The pixels in a 24-bit PNG can be both colored and transparent, and have 'alpha' transparency as opposed to binary transparency.
   

Forms API (FAPI) is one of the coolest pieces of Drupal.

The power and flexibility of hook_form_alter has made it possible to change the behavior of a module, without actually modifying any code in the original module, and has created a whole new class of "helper" modules that enhance the capabilities of existing modules. But this article isn't about form_alter.

A few people at the Seattle DUG have asked me how to drop sidebars from panels generated pages. With Panels 2, this is made easy, just a configuration setting. However if you are using the original panels module, you'll need to add a little snippet of code to your theme's template.php file:

// Hide sidebars on panel pages