Scott Vandehey's Blog

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Semantic Views is Awesome

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

Like any Drupal themer, I've done my share of grumbling about the frequently ridiculous level of nested divs with dozens of classes. I'd heard some people mention a module called Semantic Views, but I never really understood what it was for until I found this video. If you don't understand what the big deal is either, take the four minutes to watch. It's a total "ah-ha!" moment. I'm happy to say that I just used Semantic Views for the first time on a client site, and it's just as awesome as everyone says. It saved me a ton of work and let me get exactly the markup I wanted, even while working around Chuck's nested views. Read More…

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How We Upgraded Metal Toad to HTML5 and Drupal 7

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

Our new site design is live, so if you're reading this in a feed reader, please click on through! In a nutshell, we wanted to redesign to take advantage of Drupal 7, HTML5, and dramatically improve the readability and usability of the site as a whole. Read More…

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How to Change the Content-Type Meta Tag in Drupal

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

I'm working on an HTML5 theme for Drupal 7 right now, and I needed to change the meta content-type tag. By default it looks like this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />, and I needed the updated HTML5 version: <meta charset="utf-8" />. Normally, you can replace these things in one of the theme template files, but in this case, the meta tag was hard-coded in the Drupal source code somewhere, so I needed a programmatic solution. Here's what I found for both Drupal 6 and 7. Read More…

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Big news for web fonts and video today

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

The codec wars around the HTML5 video element might be settled sooner than you think: Basically, Google just open-sourced VP8, a video codec. VP8 is being combined with the Vorbis audio codec to create a new video format called WebM. Read More…

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Drupal Theming 101: Theme Developer Module

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

If you haven't already heard of it, the Theme Developer is a great tool. It works like firebug, but for Drupal. You can click any element on the page to inspect it, and the Theme Developer window will show you what template files and functions were used to render it, and give you suggestions on which files you can edit to affect it. For a newbie Drupal themer, this can be a god-send. Read More…

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Drupal Theming 101: How to Remove System Stylesheets

by Scott Vandehey, CSS Ninja

When you first start creating a Drupal theme, you might be frustrated by the large number of stylesheets that are included by default in your theme -- especially if you're creating a Zen sub-theme. Most of the documentation suggests that you override these styles in your own themename.css file. You can certainly do this, but it can make managing your CSS a nightmare, trying to keep straight what lines are your own code, and which are just there to override some default Drupal style you didn't want. Read More…