Zen theme

I have been procrastinating from things I ought to be doing in favour of hacking on SteamedPenguin. For a long time now I have been preaching the bounties of working with the Zen theme for Drupal to the Twin Cities Drupal User Group. Until now I haven't actually used the theme on my own very much. So I started playing with the the template system and the CSS a bit to see what I could come up with.

What you see as of now is a work in progress but very usable already. Most of the heavy lifting is being done by the underlying Zen theme. My personal theme then takes in the underlying theme and makes modifications. This allows me to take on whatever upgrades the underlying theme makes, including bug-fixes.

While I wasn't going to do more work on the site until this weekend, I couldn't resist when I saw what James Walker with his site using Views 2. The Views module for Drupal allows the administrator to create custom content flows and the latest version exudes just all sort of cool by making it easy to create custom data collections, custom feeds, and data exports. Think mashups.

What other content management systems do through specialized functions, template tags, or plugins Drupal does with one generalized module. To top it off, the module shows you what it is doing so that those who want to learn more about SQL can learn.

So if you meet Earl Miles, give him a big, fat, wet kiss in thanks for one of the coolest pieces of software, not only in the Drupal realm but all around.

I am preparing myself for a presentation on using the Zen theme for Drupal. I could, and should, use another site to play around with but I tend to use and abuse SteamedPenguin because it is handy and because it is easy for me to work with an actual product rather than having to create a design to be populated. When I do web development I prefer to have the actual content before starting to work. Content is still king, right? Creating designs from scratch has zero appeal to me because design is supposed to follow from form not the other way around.

In playing with Zen on SteamedPenguin I desired a graphical representation for this site, something that had been lacking for several years. Looking for graphics of penguins that are licensed freely really pushes you towards using a representation of Tux the Linux mascot. This posed a problem for me as using software like Gimp or Krita isn't a core competency. While looking through the Wikipedia article on Tux I saw the very pretty and shiny Crystallized Tux. I saved the image and opened it up with Inkscape.

I made two small modifications to the original image. I inverted the line that makes the penguin smile and flipped it so that the contented smile turns into a curl is displeasure. Next I created two areas with the Bezier tool to conform to the upper curvature of the eyes so that the open, happy look turns into a scowl.