DXPR Drupal Blog

Update: This plugin has materialized, check out the SooperFish jQuery multi-column drop-down plugin

From previous blog posts I've learned that multi column / animated dopdown menus are really in demand. I've now pretty much completed a new jQuery plugin that handles all this. At first I started modifying superfish but I had learned that superfish uses some really funky events bindings and event handling which caused the submenu-hide animations to fail on sub-sub menus, and there were some other weird bugs.

So I spent the whole day coding a new plugin based on the much leaner jQuery droppy plugin and had a much better time working up from there! So now I thought why stop now, maybe someone can think of some cool features that I haven't yet implemented.

So I just checked the jQuery Corner plugin, which I've seen used in the Acquia/TNT/Fusion themes, and its a plugin that adds rounded corners to blocks without using images.

I've just been playing around with it and now I'm thinking where were you when I started putting 28 rounded corners images in a css sprite image and control them with dozens of lines of CSS selectors.

The reason why this type of plugin is so nice with Drupal is that it works perfectly even under these common situations:

I'm working on a new framework for dropdown menus and I'm running out of ideas. So far I got:

1. Animation on showing as well as hiding the menu (superfish only supports on-show)
2. Automatic configurable multi-column dropdowns. When number of items in a submenu exceeds set number a submenu is 2 columns, or 3 columns. (will look like http://www.whitehouse.gov)
3. Added support for custom easing, including the additional easing from the jQuery easing plugin and some homebrew easing*.
4. Animated properties are configurable (widh/height/opacity)

So what cool menu feature would you like to have on your next Drupal site? drop your idea in the comments!

*my new and favorite dropdown easing:

I love the look and feel of mega drop-down menus, but the Drupal menu system does not have an interface that facilitates grouping of links within menus, and it's even more difficult to throw HMTL into the menu that isn't part of the list of links.

I would love to be able to have a primary menu like this: http://demo.yootheme.com/ without having to create a handcoded php-block or having to resort to a custom module that pulls views into menu containers. Is it possible in Drupal 7, or does anyone have a bright idea that makes this doable?

I got a bug report for the Syan theme today about problems with openpublish - all the blocks were gone.

I hadn't tried openpublish before so I decided to check it out. Wow! A 10 megabyte Drupal distribution, including well over a hundred contrib modules. Furthermore, this distribution bypasses the Drupal block system and uses the Context module instead.

After deleting some fix in my theme's code I discovered that theme_blocks was the culprit. I checked the Context module code and found that Context was overriding theme_blocks! It uses this to output block content through it's own system, unfortunately there appears no other way to hook into the block content other than using the theme function.

Lots of interesting stuff has happened to theming Drupal Theming in 2009. The emergence of various theme shops, a pack of new basethemes, and a big improvement in the overall quality of the themes.
Drupal themes are getting better and it looks like this is an ongoing process. Just a few years ago everyone complained that Drupal themes were boring and all looked the same… Joomla and Wordpress were thought to have much better designs available.
From the support emails I get from my premium themes product line I’ve heard from many clients that they’ve switched from Joomla to Drupal because they finally found a theme that matched their needs, so for some users the quality of themes can be a factor of paramount importance for their CMS choice.

This is my first ever blog post, so I'm going to keep it simple, and start with this easy trick to add adsense to your articles. This trick does not require the usage of the adsense module, or any other module. Actually, this trick does not even require adsense, because in essence, we'll be creating an in-content block in wich you can put any type of advertising you like.First of all, we're going to create a new block region. Put the following code in your template.php file, if you don't have one, create a template.php file and put it in the directory of your theme:function yourtheme_regions() {
return array(
'right' => t('right sidebar'),
'left' => t('left sidebar'),
'content' => t('content'),
'header' => t('header'),
'footer' => t('footer'),
'incontent' => t('in content')
);
}