Nimbupani Designs

In the first post of this series I covered migrating and backing up content in Drupal 6. Today it will be Drupal 6 modules.

As you might infer from my tweets, I have a love-hate relationship with Drupal. I want to document here what I gathered in my quest to move my blog to Drupal 6, to spare you some of the back path-breaking work.

I hope to cover what I learnt about Drupal 6 migration, modules, and design in 3 posts. I assume you have a blog running Drupal 5 and you know the meaning of a Web Server or a Database.

I started drafting this post about a month ago, giddy with the news about Microsoft joining SVG Working Group and all the possibilities SVG portended. So, I started dreaming of creating a demo of how SVG could be used by web developers now, as background images with fall-back support, webfonts, and what not. Why, you ask? Think about all these that you can do with SVG using CSS:

Steve Jobs ate his hat when he announced the iBook application for the tablet, but the iBook portends a bright future for web designers too. Wait, what? Books and web designers, how are they even related? One word: EPUB.

I use Comment Closer to close comments on old posts to reduce spam on my blog. I wanted visitors to know immediately if a post was no longer accepting comments, and give them alternative means of contacting me about the post. You can see it in action in these two old posts: post with comments, post with no comment. Here is how I did this in Drupal 6:

What are vendor-specific extensions?

There are some CSS properties which are only supported by specific rendering engines, e.g. -webkit-box-shadow, -moz-border-radius, or -o-transition-property. The post CSS references for Mainstream browsers has links which list other vendor specific extensions.

Since I write and tweet about HTML5 Koolaid, it is only appropriate that my website also incorporates the new and improved semantic elements of HTML5. I also figured it would be the right time to upgrade to Drupal 6.

Here is how you can create a theme which uses some of the new elements of HTML5. This is not the only way to do it, but simply my attempt at creating one. Please comment if you know of better ways to do it.

I often hunt for official specifications for which CSS property is supported on which version of a browser. The fastest and best source for that is Sitepoint CSS Reference. But sometimes I like to verify it with the official documentation. So that I can have more time to tweet be more productive, here are the links to the official documentation of CSS support for all mainstream browsers.

Finally, the 3 month long redesign of nimbupani.com is complete. The design was first explored in nimbu.in, and, as you can see, I made minor changes while adapting it to this site. Here are some of the changes that you can look forward to:

HTML 5

This site uses HTML 5 markup and uses HTML 5 valid code (at least for the recent posts), which unfortunately means Firefox 2 users will get weird layout issues. Sorry Firefox 2 users, please subscribe or turn off styling for a better experience.

Chris Hills brought Data URIs to my attention in a comment on my post on web fonts. I had not thought about using Data URIs in CSS at all, but others have.

Data URIs allow any file to be embedded inline within CSS. Here is an example of a Data URI: