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.

TopNotchThemes is excited to be able to offer our new Acquia Marina theme, developed for Acquia, as a free GPL-licensed theme on Drupal.org. This is the same theme that ships with the recently released Acquia Drupal distribution.

We’ve put a lot of research and effort into all of our Drupal themes, and we’re glad to have this opportunity to show off an example of the results to everyone, whether or not they choose to purchase one of our premium themes. Our goal is to pack as much power, flexibility, and gorgeous design as possible into each and every one of our themes, and Acquia Marina is no exception.

Designed especially for Acquia for blogs and community sites, Acquia Marina is also flexible enough to be used for a wide variety of site types and layouts. The theme includes 15 collapsible content regions and our advanced theme settings, which allow an incredible amount of customization from the point-and-click admin interface. All without requiring you to install any additional modules.

Lynda.com, a provider of educational materials which consists of an “Online Training Library”, recently released a 7 hour video course entitled “Drupal Essential Training” authored and narrated by Tom Geller.

Most of the courses at lynda.com are for graphic-arts software like Photoshop. The Drupal course was designed to be useful to — and understood by — the lynda.com subscribers. As such, it assumed no prior understanding of system administration, programming, or other skills that you’d find in a different sector of Drupal users. The course, as well as all other lynda.com courses, is available as part of a $25/month subscription, and will also be released on DVD [edit: DVD version now available].

A 4-1/2 minute discussion of requirements for the course is found in the free video “Checking Drupal’s requirements”.

This course covers basic concepts of content management and content management systems. Tom compares Drupal to other popular content management systems such as Joomla, Wordpress and MediaWiki and gives advice on when to use Drupal and when not to use Drupal.

Feeling that one of the biggest challenges for new users to Drupal, Tom focused an entire section to installation. “About 45 minutes of the course is dedicated to installation… and even that doesn’t touch on the many, many, MANY things that can go wrong”, Tom told us via email. “This is the first exposure that new users will have to Drupal: If they can’t get past the installation, the rest is moot”.