Idaho Commission for Libraries

The most often heard request from our participating e-branch libraries is "more themes."

Themes, within the Drupal system, are the designs, or skins, that can be applied to a site, determining the layout regions of pages, the colors of links, ambient graphics and colors, etc. In the initial launch of our project, we provided a handful of themes, and a promise to provide more as we were able.

It's a challenge to create a theme for a system that is as configurable as our e-branch system. Our current designs (which don't measure up to everyone's tastes, but then, what does?) , are very durable in that they hold up whether they are being used in a three column layout, a two column layout or a single column layout.

They have an all-around flexibility that is a challenge to make work, but these designs do work.

In the future we will be adding more themes. Some of these won't be as flexible as our current ones (eg. you may only get a left column and a content area), but they will offer things these themes don't/can't. Our goal is to have a variety of themes available so that:

1. our libraries can find a theme that fits their personality, and
2. so that we have enough themes so all our sites don't look alike!

And speaking of themes, on Tuesday of this week, I performed a Drupal update and as part of that process, the default themes that come with a basic Drupal installation snuck back into the list of theme options. I had initially removed these themes as options because (that taste thing again) I didn't think anyone would care for them. Before I had a chance to remove them this time, however, I got a phone call from one of our participating librarians saying, "Thank you! Thank you for the new themes, we've already started using the Pushbutton theme!" So Themedora's box is opened. It looks like those themes are here to stay.

To change your theme, login to your site then click Administer > Themes and pick one!

Please note, there is an Internet Explorer 6 bug associated with the Pushbutton theme that sometimes causes the background image to appear in front of images in your page. We'll post the fix/workaround in our FAQs.

And, news of things to come, in the next few months we will begin to explore upgrading to the newest version of Drupal, which includes a new stock theme: the Garland theme. Garland allows users to pick their own colors! We'll keep you posted. It's still a way off.