One thing you won’t find in any other themes out there is the sheer number of configurable options we make available to you in all our Drupal 6 themes. These do the heavy lifting for you, and help you to get rid of some of Drupal’s annoyances and make your theme from TopNotchThemes even more your own, without having to write a line of code!

This handbook page explains all the theme settings that are included with our themes.

The Basics

The basic theme settings built in to Drupal for any theme to use. Your logo, site name, and slogan usually appear near each other, at the top of the page.  You can use these checkboxes to turn off any of those fields, and set the text for these under Site Configuration > Site Information. The mission statement is also usually near the top, and is usually used for longer text.  You can add simple HTML to the mission statement (bold, a link, etc) for further customization. This field can also be used to easily highlight a certain promotion or featured service.

User pictures in posts and User pictures in comments are for turning the display of user avatars (icons) on and off next to nodes and comments they author, if you have this feature enabled on your site. You can turn on user pictures as User management > User settings.

Most of our themes also have an integrated search box. While you can always add a search box as a block as well, you can usually toggle a custom styled search box in a theme on and off with this checkbox.

The shortcut icon is the tiny icon (also called a ‘favicon’) that shows up next to your website’s URL in your visitors’ address bar, or next to your site name if they bookmark you. All our themes come with a custom favicon to match.

Primary and secondary links are special menus for your site. Primary links are used for your main site navigation menu, and secondary links can be either a set of sub-navigation menu items in a sidebar or other location, or also often appear as small text links in the upper right section of a theme. If you haven’t yet, you’ll want to add and configure these at Site building > Menus.

Upload your own logo and shortcut icon (favicon)

Above we mentioned your logo and shortcut icon — here is where you can upload your own if you’re not using the default that came with the theme.

Mission statement display

While the mission statement can be enabled/disabled above entirely, by default it will only ever show on your site’s front page. This is great if you want to highlight it specifically for the front page, but if you want it to display throughout your entire site, you can set that option here.

Show/hide breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a trail of navigation that usually displays at the top of a page to let the user know where they are in the site. They usually look something like this:
Home > Blogs > username’s blog

You may not need these, but with a TNT theme, the choice is up to you! Out of the box, Drupal doesn’t always give you exactly what you expect to see here, especially if you’re using Views. Check out the Custom Breadcrumbs module for more control.

Anonymous usernames

This gets rid of an (in our opinion) ugly little detail when you have anonymous commenting enabled — the display of the text "Not verified" next to comments. Uncheck this to turn that "feature" off.

Details in search results

By default, Drupal’s search results give you a whole lot of text below the returned nodes, which you may not want. You can uncheck any of these fields here, so they will not display below nodes on search results.

Author & date byline on nodes

This is the "byline" that appears near the title of nodes. You may want only the author or date to show up, both, or neither. Our themes let you select how this should be displayed, per content type. For example, you might want to show dates on press release nodes, nothing on static pages, and both author and date on story nodes. Simply check the "Use custom settings…" box and then customize the settings for each content type below.

If you want to change the format of the date, go to Site configuration > Date and time.

Taxonomy & vocabularies

You can also do the same kinds of customizations per content type to many other parts of nodes. In this case, you can make several choices with how your taxonomy terms (aka. tags or categories) are displayed. You can choose from showing taxonomy terms only on full node pages, on teasers, both, or neither!

There are also two options for the display format: should all terms be together in one line (usually separated by commas or large spaces), or on separate lines? Vocabularies are containers for similar terms. For example, on a music store website, you might have one vocabulary for Genre, another for Format, and a third for tagging items as certain "Employee Picks". But this last vocabulary is only used for internal organization of content, such as if you wanted to create a block of "Kelly’s Top Picks" that only showed items tagged with "kelly".

If you choose the top option (Display each vocabulary on a new line) and only check the Genre and Format vocabulary checkboxes, your node would display its taxonomy terms like this:

Genre: Alternative
Format: CD Single

‘Read More’ links

This section allows you to control the text and properties of the "Read More" link that appears at the end of teasers. You can change all these options per content type. For example, you might want your "Article" content type’s read more link to say "Read more of this article". The tooltip is the text that displays in a tiny popup next to the mouse cursor when a user hovers over the link. You may want to put a longer description in here.

You can also add text or HTML before and after each of these links. You might want to add parentheses before and after so it shows as (Read more), or use some inline styling to make them larger, italicized, etc.

‘Add new comment’ links

These comment settings are particularly useful if you want to add your own special flair to your site’s comments, or you’re using comments for something else, like ratings or feedback. You can adjust these settings differently for each content type, for teasers vs. full nodes, and again add any custom prefix and suffix.

Link text for ‘Comments’ and ‘New comments’

Here you can completely customize the text that’s displayed for existing comments.

Search engine optimization (SEO) settings

Page titles

One of, if not the most important thing for improving your site’s ranking in search engines, is the page title tag. This is the text that displays as the title of the page in your visitors’ browsers, and what shows as the clickable link when your site shows up in search engine results. You can choose here between predefined patterns of your site’s name, slogan, mission statement, and page title. You can also add your own separator icon.

For best search engine results, we’d recommend the following settings:
Front page: Site slogan | Site name or a custom title of your choosing with lots of great keywords
Other pages: Page title | Site name — it’s best to put the title of the page first, so all pages don’t start with the same site name

For further customization of page titles for each node and things like Views, check out the (aptly named) Page Title module.

Meta tags

The text description above says it all — you can put in a basic meta description here that search engines will display with your page title. But we’d highly recommend the Meta Tags module!