Theming Tips

Using Grunt in Drupal Themes

Less, coffee script, lint, etc are amazing tools for building great themes quickly! But how do you keep everything organized and compiled easily, especially during development, when you need your stuff to be processed every time your save a file?

In the past I've used CodeKit, and it really is a well-built, intuitive tool. However, due to portability and cross-platform compatibility, I recently switched to using Grunt.

Styling auto injected calendar and phone links in emails

I recently had to style the ugly Calendar and Phone links that iOS injects into emails. Here's a snippet for it: Just thought I'd share! :)
Tags: 

Make Responsive Drupal Sites!

There are hundreds of Drupal sites being launched every day, and I've noticed that out of the ones I've been able to see, few of them are responsive. Due to the continually rising number of mobile devices and portable web browsing devices, the demand for responsive design and development in websites is getting higher. In other words, if you are building web sites, they should be responsive, or at least mobile friendly.

The Base Building Blocks Module

I just pushed up version 7.x-1.0.0 of the Base Building Blocks module. It includes a simple module, and a couple simple submodules that create customizable blocks for Navbars, and menus. It's easy to install and use: https://github.com/patrickocoffeyo/BaseBuildingBlocksModule

I'm going to work on getting this up on drupal.org as a project for now, but it's a good solid start. I'm also going to start working on documenting everything properly. :)

Whats comin up next?

I just wanted to take a few minutes and let you know what I'm working on at the moment, as it may be important/useful to you in the near future. I'd love any suggestions, features, ideas, code or input that you might have for me. :)

Base Building Blocks 2.3.0

I just pushed Base Building Blocks version 7.x-2.3.0 up to github, and would like to outline some of the major changes. :)

The Template System

Base Building Blocks Twitter Updates

I started a Twitter profile that I'll post updates on to keep you guys in the loop. Also, feel free to tweet me and throw me any suggestions: Follow Twitter Updates

As a side note, I updated BBB to Twitter Bootstrap 2.2.1 a few minutes ago, so you are good to go for the latest version.

Squarifying Bootstrap Spans

I just wrote a quick little js plugin to make any element's height equal to it's width. It's not really bootstrap specific, but it's helpful for spans if you need a span to be square at all times, even when the responsive resizing is done.

Implementing Less in Drupal 7 Base Themes

I just pushed up some code that converts the CSS files in Base Building Blocks into less files. There is a drupal.less file that contains styling for the default Drupal elements. In app.less, it imports bootstrap's mixins, variables, and utilities. In style.less, the bootstrap less files, app.less, and drupal.less, then it compiles into style.css, which is what gets fed to Drupal.

Node ID Page Templates

Earlier I posted on how to make a page template based off of the node type. (Slide to the spot). Well now I'm back with a new solution. Occasionally you may find yourself needing to have a page template for a specific node ID. While this should theoretically be rare, in some cases it could be necessary.

An Example Instance