Tendu

Tendu is no longer under active development.

Tendu - A Wireframe BiDi Theme for Developers [Looking for a new tag line, any ideas?]
Sponsored by Linnovate

Tendu is the sum of my 5 years experience in HTML and CSS development for Bi-Directional websites, 2 of them using Drupal.
It was born from the lack of a light, stable, table-less and cross-browser theme that support RTL and BiDi layout "out of the box".
Tendu has a lot of the useful features that can be found in other "Starter themes" like Zen (I copied or re-wrote some of Zen's features, some good implementations there) but is much less complicated and bloated then these themes, though a bit less friendly for the non-professional user.

Help me improve Tendu
I am aware that changing Tendu 2.1 to your needs is not that simple if you are not a CSS professional.
Please, test Tendu and post issues about anything that bugs you in this release,
I can't make it better if I don't know what the users think of it.

Main Features for 6.x-2.x versions:

Table-less design, supports 1,2 or 3 columns, fixed or flexible width layouts.
Full support for multi-language, left-to-right and right-to-left websites.
- Said to have the best RTL support out of all the starter themes (http://drupalstaging.com/starter-themes/starter-theme-comparison.html).
Cross-browser support for all major browsers, and reported to work on some of the older or more exotic ones (Among them IE4, IE5 and Amaya).
Cross-browser support for 100% body height with the footer sticked to the bottom of the viewport on short pages.
Accessibility:
- Relative font size and well formed page structure for easy font size change and for fluent page read in screen reader.
- Hidden links that pop on focus to the content at the top and bottom of the page for screen readers and keyboard-only navigation
- Hidden headers to menus to comply with accessibility guidelines
Degradable design for older and non-standard browsers to avoid the use of CSS hacks.
Integrated "conditional-styles" module, for easy addition of IE conditional comments through the theme's .info file.
Automatically adds the "Language Switcher" block when "locale" module is installed and more then one language is defined.
Integrated search box, primary and secondary menus.
Features 9 dynamic content regions for flexible design.
Sub-theme support, inside or outside the base theme.
CSS3 round corners for Mozilla/Webkit browsers.
Built in support for Block Class and Block Theme modules in block.tpl
Theme Settings form to toggle the Language Switcher and Accessibility links
More...

Features for 5.x-1.x versions:

Automatically loads RTL css files if exist.
Support for the i18n package "out of the box", (but not dependent on it).
Supports fluid and fixed width designs, with a premeditated decision to support only fixed or 100% widths in IE6
Supports 1, 2 or 3 columns layouts, fluid and fixed.
Cross-browser design - Supports all major browsers and a lot of the minor ones for both LTR and RTL layouts.
Simple, clean and heavily commented markup and CSS, to ease developers in adopting it.

More Info

Notes about Drupal 5.x version
I updated Tendu for Drupal 5.x with all the fixes made in the Drupal 6.x-1.x branch and (finally) removed the i18n module dependencies.
I will not introduce new features for Drupal 5.x-1.x version, only bug fixes.

The theme structure:

Tendu has 2 parts - The base theme and the sub-themes.
The main theme defines the basic CSS, template functions and structure
The sub-themes define the design, and in some cases override the base theme's features.
In Tendu I use the concept of sub-theming a bit differently: Tendu itself is not intended to be used as a standalone theme, but as a core for advanced layouts (= sub-themes) to be built on.

Right now Tendu 2.1 Beta has 2 sub-themes -
Tendu Default Design: A basic clean sub-theme that demonstrates what can be done with Tendu, can be used as a stand-alone theme or as a base to develop other themes on.
~~Doil (In Development, not ready for production yet): A theme developed for http://drupal.org.il - The home for Drupal developers and users in Israel.~~
"Doil" subtheme, unlike the rest of the theme is not ready for prime time just yet so I removed it from the current release.
It is still in "dev" and hopefully will be back in the next release.

Quick start: (Until I find the time to create some proper documentation)

Note that at least a basic knowledge in CSS is recommended to costume Tendu.

After installing Tendu, select "Tendu Default Design" in Site Building -> Themes.
In Theme Settings->Tendu Default Design, make sure "Primary Links", "Secondary Links", "Search Box" (requires the Search module) and "Language Switcher" (requires the locale module, shows only when more then one language is defined for the site) are selected.
Open style.css in an editor and follow the instructions in the comments.

There are four important sections there:

"Full Viewport Height" and "Stick footer to bottom of the page"

for sticking the footer to the bottom of the window in pages with short content. A nice to have feature.
Note that this definition sets a fixed height to the footer so blocks in the footer will be hidden if height is not set correctly

"Fonts"

for setting a global font size other then 12px or font other then "Ariel, Helvetica, sans-serif".

"Page Width"

for setting a fixed of flexible page width, with support for fixed or 100% page width in IE6 or lower.

"Sidebar Widths"

is most likely the only part in this file that everybody need to edit.
Note that any change to the sidebars widths or paddings must be edited in ie6.css and in style-rtl.css and ie6-rtl.css if the site is BiDi .
Any other changes like colors, block designs etc. should be done in the file tendu_default/style_subtheme.css (and it's -rtl.css companion).

Thats it. If you want to use Tendu Default Design as-is, these are the only settings you need to change.

One more thing...
If you edit style-subtheme.css in /tendu_default folder you'll find a large commented area at the end.
If you uncomment this part, your site will have rounded corners in modern Mozilla and Webkit browsers.

You can see Tendu 2.1b4 in action at http://tendu.tombigel.com.

Developed by Tom Bigelajzen, and supported by Drupal Israel.