Four Kitchens

Shannon
Lucas

Shannon Lucas

Recent Insights

By Shannon Lucas

Promiscuous stylesheets in Drupal 7

One common practice when using CSS frameworks such as 960 Grid System, Blueprint, or Baseline is to use a CSS reset. Each web browser applies a set of default styles to HTML elements, and these styles vary among browser vendors. A CSS reset is a stylesheet that clears these default styles so that you know what you're working with as you implement your theme's CSS. The caveat with a CSS reset is that it needs to come before all of your other stylesheets. This presents a problem if you want to use a reset in your Drupal theme: all of the theme's CSS will be added after Drupal's system CSS and after any modules' CSS. If your reset is loaded after these, the system and modules' styles will all be undone, which probably isn't what you want. Drupal loads theme styles last because, usually, you're just adding to or overriding the existing styles, not wiping them all clean. It is possible, however, to have Drupal output a stylesheet from your theme before the system and module stylesheets.

Learn more

Option groups in Drupal forms

One really useful HTML element that doesn't seem to get much love is optgroup. It allows you to group the items of a select list in a way that may be more meaningful (and more readable) to your users than a long, uninterrupted list. The option group labels themselves can't be selected, so there's no need for back end logic to filter them out of your form data. Drupal's Form API provides option groups, but it isn't immediately obvious how to use them. A quick check of the select type and #options attribute in the Form API reference doesn't provide any clues about option groups, so it's necessary to dive into Drupal's source code.

Learn more

Let’s talk!

We’d love to hear from you. Tell us a bit about your project — or just say hello!