Menu Minipanels is a very cool little module that allows you to attach a mini panel to a menu item, which then pops open when you hover the menu item - aka instant mega menu!

In this tutorial I'll show just how easy it is to do a Twitter style drop-down login form in Drupal 6 (probably just as easy if not identical in Drupal 5 and 7). If you don't know what this looks like these days you better get over to http://twitter.com/ and scope it out so you know that I'm on about - see the link in the top right corner...

Requirements

* We're gonna cheat and use the LoginToboggan module
* Moderate CSS skills

Login Toboggan

* Download and install the module

A recent client wanted to remove everything from the user login page when the site was in maintenance (or Site off-line as its referred to in most system messages and documentation). Just showing the user login form when the site is off-line actually makes a lot of sense because whats the point of showing things like primary links, search block or whatever else might show on your normal user login page.

I've been asked a few times by Drupal themers and designers how to do 100% header and footer backgrounds in Adaptivetheme—and retain the theme settings so end users can still adjust the overall page width. Actually this is pretty easy - its just a matter of adding a couple of wrapper DIV's in the right places and overriding the layout variables that Adaptivetheme uses to set the width.

First we wrap the various page elements in a set of wrapper DIV's. The new .container DIV will be full width and the .container-width wrapper will set the width - see the PHP snippet below.

We had a project recently where we needed to add first and last classes to Drupals secondary local tasks. I was in a bit of a hurry so instead of trying to figure this out myself I Googled it and pretty quickly found this post on Drupal.org which seemed to fit the bill. Problem is the post doesn't actually tell you how or where to use the snippet, which isn't much good for those of you struggling with Drupal in the first place.

Drupal's template suggestions are plentiful and pretty powerful stuff, however, given all the options there are some noteable oversights. In particular the ability to use page-taxonomy suggestions per vocabulary, something like page-vocab-1.tpl.php to theme all taxonomy term pages in vocabulary 1 (where 1 is the VID or vocabulary id).

To achieve this we turn to our trusty preprocess_page function which by now every Drupal themer worth his or her salt knows all about.

How to add a Superfish drop menu to Genesis or Adaptivetheme is one of the most common questions I get. Believe when I say I get emails from well intentioned Drupal users on a weekly basis asking me this. So now, please stop emailing me, I relent, heres how its done.

1. Get the Files

First, download the archive attached to this page. Unzip it and place in your theme.

Quick list of some handy font family groups (often called "font stacks") for web design and Drupal theme development. Includes the three groups that come with Adaptivetheme starter theme and an example of how to set the font-family in your CSS.

Basic Groups

Sans serif - smaller

"Helvetica Neue", Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Sans serif - larger

Verdana, Geneva, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Serif - smaller

Garamond, Perpetua, "Nimbus Roman No9 L", "Times New Roman", serif