Drupal Planet

We did not expect the user response to our free Drupal themes Danland is extremely gratifying. In less than six months to reach users who are so numerous. This proves that our theme is very stable, powerful and flexible.

Danland is one of our steps in introducing our services to the wider community. We are providing custom themes for Drupal, of course, we serve a variety of services for Drupal, such as consulting and manufacturing site based on Drupal.

After some time to use our free theme Danland, we decided to change the appearance of our website in several weeks or several months ahead.

We currently do not use CCK, Views, Panels, or Pathauto module to organize the content of our website, we use only standard features of Drupal, with this expected performance of our website will be faster since the query to the server just execute some commands compared to when using above modules.

Yesterday, we releasing the new version of Danland (version 6.x-2.0). Lots of changes we make to this version, besides adding new features, we also fix some bugs reported by the theme users.

Highly recommended that you backup the previous theme if you want to install the latest Danland. Here are some of the changes we make to Danland:

Several weeks ago we created a Drupal demo site and for the theme of the demo site, we use our free themes. This is one of our steps to prepare ourselves for serving the web development services, and we are focusing on Drupal.

You can visit the demo site to see how Drupal and our free themes in action.

Drupal demo site.

Of course we know that the contents of the RSS feed in front page will appear if we promote an article to the front page, and we can change some settings such as number of articles appearing in the RSS feed and other standard configurations.

But what if we only promote a single article on the frontpage? How to keep my latest articles in the RSS feed? Is there a way to overcome this without using modules such as Views?

Danetsoft uses a sub-theme of Danland, namely Danblog. We slightly change the theme a little different from the standard, especially on article title and block title.

Changes that we do is only on the font family in these parts, the default theme using the Verdana and we have turned into Arial. We also already commit this in Danland's repository, and the next release of Danland will include these changes.

This is the descriptions of sub-theme from Drupal.org:

Sub-themes are just like any other theme, with one difference: They inherit the parent theme's resources. There are no limits on the chaining capabilities connecting sub-themes to their parents. A sub-theme can be a child of another sub-theme, and it can be branched and organized however you see fit. This is what gives sub-themes great potential.

Imagine starting with a base theme designed as wireframes, then applying and refining all the details from a sub-theme. Then, from the same wireframe, testing out alternate designs by branching out another sub-theme. Working on a multi-site installation but you need a cohesive look and feel? With sub-theming, a lot of the design resources can be shared. Site-specific changes can be set to a specific sub-theme, but any shared resources can be edited once to be applied across all the installations. With careful planning, the possibilities are endless.

Learn more about sub-theme.

You can also create a sub-theme for Danland, here's how:

These problems arise in our theme, Danland. We include three jQuery plugins in Danland, and the plugins are:

• jQuery Cycle plugin for image slideshow.
• jQuery pngFix plugin to handle the PNG transparency in IE 6.
• jQuery Superfish menu plugin to provide a superfish drop-down menu.

We resolve this conflict by changing the way in calling the jQuery plugins (below if we call the jQuery Cycle plugin)

Danland provide a slideshow feature that are still very rarely included in the standard installation of a Drupal theme, it using the jQuery Cycle plugins by M. Alsup.

Effects are used in Danland's image slideshow is fade effect. And to change the slideshow also very easily, you can read the Danland handbook we've made at Drupal.org for more details.