It’s been three months now since we released the Acquia Marina theme, a free Drupal theme developed for Acquia’s Drupal distribution and released on drupal.org.  It’s been an amazing ride of feedback so far, and widespread use and testing by the community has made both it and all our themes so much better (and has kept the issue queue very busy, which Jay has done a remarkable job of handling).  For that we send a big THANK YOU to both Acquia and the Drupal community!

3,000 people are using Acquia Marina, according to the usage stats, making it the second most popular contrib theme (after Zen, naturally) on drupal.org!

We’ve come across some great uses of it in the wild and wanted to share a few favourites:

Intelligent Sustainable Energy
A very clean interpretation, changing the blue to grey and a logo to match.  Kudos!

Mommie 911
Wow, Marina with a completely new colour scheme!

EarthShare Washington
There’s not a whole lot of Marina left here, but you can see it — nice job on making it your own and great colours.

Acamdex
This one is my favourite unmodified (as far as I can tell at least) use of Marina.  Great use of the preface regions with the checkmark bullets for key points.

Town of Williston
Ok, this one almost makes me wish we’d done it in grey to start with — simply beautiful!

SpreadThunderbird

I made no secret about our positive thoughts on the new O’Reilly book, Using Drupal. But in case you weren’t sure just how much we love this book, we’re offering you a special treat:

Anyone who buys a premium Drupal theme from TopNotchThemes this month will get a free digital copy of Using Drupal, on us!

All you have to do is ask for it! This applies to anyone who purchases a theme before midnight PST on Dec 31st 2008, and anyone who’s already bought a theme in December – just shoot us an email.

Based on the great feedback and questions we’ve had from TNT theme users so far, this is the handbook for Drupal we wish all our customers had, so for a short time we’re going to make it happen. If you’ve had that idea for a side business or site upgrade on the back burner, now’s a good time to snag a freebie along with a new look and feel for your Drupal site :)

PS. We’ve got more themes now updated to Drupal 6, and new Ubercart themes (for Drupal 5 and 6).

Photo: PingVision

There are many ways to style and reorganize the user login block, especially with the power that Drupal 6 provides themers. As you probably know, the user login block displays vertically by default. A few of our themes require that the user login block be displayed horizontally to better fit the look and feel of the theme. I set out to find a way to achieve this without editing any *.tpl files. By just editing the theme’s CSS I was able to get the results we were looking for and have complete control over the styling of the user login block. I also learned some neat tricks using jQuery to help with the display of the labels for the input fields.

Adding the necessary scripts

In this example using Drupal 6 I am going to show you how to style the user login block to be horizontal rather than vertical and also incorporate the use of the jQuery overlabel script. This makes your input labels be displayed in the input forms themselves and hide when there is text in them and display when they are empty (check out an example). This makes for a nice clean horizontal user login block and requires no custom programming.

Being that Drupal 6 ships with jQuery there is no need to download it. All we need is to download the jQuery overlabel file and add it to our theme’s directory. Be sure to remove the “_.txt” from the end of this file so it is named “jquery.overlabel.js”.

And now for something completely different with a little Friday evening amusement from Drupal IRC...

If there was a Drupal Magic 8-ball, what would it look like?

Proposed responses:
"There's a module for that"
"The answer is Views" (already on a t-shirt)
"Ask webchick"
"File an issue"
"Patches welcome"

What else? :)

TopNotchThemes is proud to announce that we have signed on to become a sponsor of the upcoming DrupalCon in Washington D.C. this March 4-7, 2009.

One of Drupal’s most appealing features is the positive relationship between the development & user communities and the growing number of businesses that support Drupal. We’re glad to be a part of that relationship, and we’re excited to be attending DrupalCon as sponsors for the first time.

Given Drupal’s prominence amongst non-profit, progressive, and issues-focused websites, Washington D.C. is an especially appropriate setting in which to explore a technology that is empowering grassroots efforts everywhere. More than anything else, DrupalCon will be—as always—an amazing experience in connecting with people who are passionate about what Drupal is and what it can do to help change the world in ways both large and small.

Here’s hoping that you’ll be able to make it to this DrupalCon and that we’ll get a chance to meet as many of you as possible, especially those of you who have been so supportive of us as we work hard to create Drupal themes that help make Drupal as beautiful as it is powerful.