howto archive

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How to use @font-face to avoid faux-italic and bold browser styles

by , Front-End Web Developer

Did you know that if you declare a custom font using @font-face, the browser will try to fake the bold and italic styles if it can’t find them? This is a clever little feature that avoids a scenario where a themer specifies a font and is then confused that bold and italics don’t work, but it can be very confusing if you actually have a bold or italic version of the font. In this article, I’ll walk you through how to properly load your font files to avoid the browser’s faux-italic and faux-bold styles. Read More…

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How to Add Theme Settings for Drupal 7

by , Front-End Web Developer

You know that list of checkboxes on the theme settings page that let you turn on and off parts of the theme like the logo or slogan? Well, you can add your own options to that list really easily in Drupal 7. In D6, this was kind of a pain, because you had to write all sorts of functions to save and load your settings to the database and handle everything properly. In D7, that's all done through the Form API, so the heavy lifting is done for you. All you need to do is tell it to add some form fields, and what the new setting is called! You'll need to create a theme-settings.php file in your theme, and add this code to it: Read More…

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How to Change the Content-Type Meta Tag in Drupal

by , Front-End Web Developer

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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Drupal Theming 101: How to Remove System Stylesheets

by , Front-End Web Developer

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…