Simply Modern is an advanced theme for Drupal 6. It provides an advanced feature set. This site is designed to demonstrate some of it's key abilities.

There are a total of 14 user regions where blocks can be placed. These user regions can be used for sidebars, header, footer, user regions at the top and bottom of the page, above and below the content area and even an ad block at the top of the page.

Scroll to the bottom to see the various user regions or click here to see the two left sidebars or two right sidebars.

Because of the CSS driven, table-less design, if a user region is not being used, the block simply is not visible and the other elements of the page fill that space.

The multiple user regions allow for multiple combinations of layouts. You can have a one column, two column or three column design with the sidebars located on the left, the right or both.

Theme Configuration

When the ThemeSetttings API is installed and turned on, there are multiple options that are added. The biggest advantage is that you can make changes to elements of the theme without having access to the back end files… or, more importantly, someone without the experience can make adjustments to the theme without needing to understand programming.

These options are found in the theme settings page and by clicking “configure” next to Simply Modern.

Body Background Color

This option provides the ability to change the body background color or allows you to load a new body background image. In addition, you can determine how you would like the image to tile.

MastHead Settings

The MastHead is the area at the top of the page below the black bar. This can be changed with a different color or a different image. In addition, you can set the height to fluid allowing the content in the header user region to define the height or you can fix the height.

Custom CSS file

You will have the option to upload your own CSS file. Without having access to the standard CSS files, you can upload a new CSS file. You can use tools like Firebug to analyze the CSS on the site and create new CSS elements on a new CSS file and upload the file.

Multiple Default Color Options

There are multiple color options to choose from that do not require any edits of the CSS files. The default color sets are green, copper, blue, black and red.

You can make the selection on the configuration page of the theme. (found at example.com/admin/build/themes)

Fixed Versus Fluid Width

You don’t have to settle for a fixed width site if you want fluid and vice versa. You can define the site’s width to any pixel dimensions you want.

Customizable Sidebars

You have the option to select the right and left side bar widths. You can set them to the size you want independent of each other. In addition, you can set the side bars to be both on the left, the right or split on either site.

Suckerfish Menu

The suckerfish menu implementation allows for you to create drop down menus. We have implemented this using the CSS code created by RoopleTheme. We have modified it to fit our implementation.

To use the suckerfish menus, you simply turn it on in the theme configuration (found at example.com/admin/build/themes) and then put the menu of your choosing in the suckerfish user region. You can learn more about menu management in our menu management tutorial.