Ivan Soto

Last night I released the first version of Cleanr, a Drupal administration theme that tries to make the interface more simple and clean. This theme was mostly created for site maintainers, usually clients that don't know much about Drupal but need to work with it everyday. The main goal is to improve Drupal administration UX the most I can. Here are some screenshots of the first version of the theme:

_Administer page with an error message_

_Collapsible fieldsets_

One of the most complicated things to understand when templating or developing modules for drupal is the theme() function. But when you know how to deal with it is really useful even when there's no way to know how many we have available. The way to use it fairly simple, let's see how the Garland theme builds the primary links:

print theme('links', $primary_links,
array('class' => 'links primary-links'));

The first argument is the actual hook we are calling, the second and third are the the arguments we are passing to that functions. So basically the theme function will output plain HTML and it's actually way cleaner than defining a function or coding a lot of php on our template.

Maybe you will be interested in reading Building a web application layout 1 if you need to know how did I setup the xhtml and basic CSS. In this part we will try to acomplish two things: Insert a javascript dropdown menu and apply the design I did just to this application.

In a way to build an entire layout for a web application we need to know what exactly we need. In this case I'm going to use a 90% width with a top menu, left menu and a right handed help box used to explain what the current section does. It's always useful to draw a mockup of the layout we want to achieve. Since this is a kind of simple layout we don't really need it, but I still did it.

When developing web aplications I usually need to put all the menu in a tree-like organization.