Aquia Prosper Theme – Visual

Just wanted to record the appearance of my theme at this point…

Header – As you can see, I have an image across the top and the primary links are below this. I like the simplicity of this.

Sidebars – To the left, in the ‘left sidebar’ I have the items available to buy in the store displayed in a list so visible on every page. (yes I know there are only 4 so far – need to create some more designs!)

Under the list of items is the shopping cart – this is only visible on pages which are directly related to the store.

There is no right sidebar at present, keeps it simple…

Main Content – This page is a store page and is displaying one of the designs. You can see that I have not been able to get the image of the t-shirt to show up. The image has been inserted using Ubercart and the theme. It is supported with the ImageCache module and the Views module. I really have to get my site online to see if that will fix it….

Had friends staying for the past week and have ignored my site completely – tut tut!  Better go do it now!!

Choosing a Theme in Drupal

So like I said in the last blog post I have now added Ubercart to my Site and I have started to get real excited coz I can see it in my mind and I can imagine how good it will be once it is finished. Its going to be a shop for hot-rod inspired t-shirt designs- it will be so awesome!

The only problem has been that I think I set myself too big a challenge with the theming.

I think that really there are so many themes out there made by people who know what they are doing that I would be a fool not to start by using one of these and making a site that way. As they are customiseable I wouldn’t have a site that looked like someone else’s, I could make it unique.

So I went for another theme hunt and I tried out a few and came up with Aquia Prosper as my favourite. Its set up for Ubercart already so it will work real well for what I want and also the colours are perfect as I would like to have a theme of black (or grey), white and red. Also its clean and clear and it seems to be really flexible.  It is based on the Fusion theme so I had to download that as well and also the module called Skinr as this is what is used for some of the flexibility with the appearance.

So far it is all going really well and I am super pleased with how it looks and works and I have even managed to get the banner (is that the correct term or is it just header?) at the top to look how I want it to by turning off the title and letting my image stand out. I uploaded a png image for this as it has no background and so I was able to use the grey background within the theme, by getting it to show thru. Its really cool to be able to do that and I am really happy with the result.

The problem I am having at the moment is that the images aren’t working as they should. I am not sure if this is because I have two image modules downloaded or if its something I have done. Thats the problem with not really knowing what I am doing – it is so great when its going well but when a problem comes along I can spend hours and hours trying to solve it and not knowing what to do. It has certainly used up a lot of time!!

What is happening is that the images I am adding in for the products are not showing anywhere. They do not show in the product description, or in the catalog or the cart. This is all set up and should work straight off with this theme so I am a bit confused as to why it isn’t. Its quite frustrating!

I have been looking on the internet and the problem appears like it may be something that a lot of people have and that many ppl can only get around it by having the site on a remote server (ie – on the actual internet) and not the local host (ie – on my computer at home) so I am going to upload, or at least I thought I would “just upload” but its proving to be more difficult than that…
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Thats me just back to add this note – all I needed to do was to ask the web hosting service for an upgrade to their premium service so I can get 100MB of disk space rather than just 10MB.

Ah so easy!!