Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

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Finally managed to update Austere theme for both Drupal 5 and 6.

It took awhile because i kept messing up the CVS tagging and branching, hence the big jump in the version... yikes! sorry. Really need to get my head around this damn CVS. I should be reading more of the Drupal Handbook.

Anyway, many thanks to Francis Pilon (of Raincity Studios) for cleaning up the code and making it conform more to Drupal coding standards.

You can grab a copy at: http://drupal.org/project/austere

Following on from my previous post, you can now download this free template for Drupal 5 and 6. It has been commited to CVS at the Drupal official site.

The template is called 'Austere' and the download link is: http://drupal.org/project/austere

Austere template is Strict xHTML and is 100% CSS driven. What's more, it also includes the use of the colour module so colour of theme can be changed on the fly. I used Pixture as the starting point to build this template.

• Integration with color module, so that colors can be changed with a color wheel on the fly
• adjustable 2/3 fixed-width layout
• W3C Valid, and tested on Firefox, IE 6/7, Opera, Safari
• Support for logo, primary links, mission, search box, shortcut icon and user pictures

NOTE: Please use the bug tracker at Drupal if you find any issues with the template.

An article on 'how to customise Austere theme' will follow shortly.

UPDATE (1 Sep 2008):
Please download from http://drupal.org/project/austere

You will find more update to date versions. Thanks.

Moshe Weitzman a Drupal developer (along with Jeff Robbins & dvessel) has helped put together a module that can only be described as being like Firebug for Firefox but used for Drupal theming.

It's release for the upcoming Drupal 6. I haven't yet tried it out but from the screencast it looks like it'll be another fantastic tool that can sit next to the developers tools for Firefox.

Having said that, i still think Drupal has got a long way to go to attract designers since they'll rather be spending time tweaking their design than to work out some PHP codes. However, if you have been theming in Drupal for a quite awhile, this is a dream tool for you. Now you don't have to worry or spend hours searching for the theme functions and etc.

Links:

• Dev Module for themers blg post
• Watch the screencast
• Dev Theme module

I was browsing through the Drupal Handbook looking for some tutorial on using CVS with Drupal and came over this great little tutorial on converting a Joomla template to Drupal. I thought i'll share this with some Joomla users that maybe be interested if they hadn't seen it yet.

Tutorial: Porting a Joomla template to Drupal.