Welcome to the Plain Grail project page, one of my free drupal themes.

The theme has been tested right on this site from the very early development stage. The latest stable release has a lot more improvements both on codes and theme settings in your administration page, as you can see from the CHANGELOG.

This theme is based on Holy Grail and controlled by Grid and developed as a subtheme of Zen. It is released under GNU General Public License (GPL) so you have my legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify it to suit your website design needs.

Other Holy Grail themes in series:

• Blog Grail
• Dark Grail

Features:

• 1, 2, or 3 column nice, clean, white fixed layout
• Equal height columns without javascript, great start for grid lovers
• Both sidebars are placed on the right, believed to be good for SEO
• Supports forms, lists, comments, quotes, codefilter, tables and Drupal maintenance page
• Supports external link popups, inactive by default. Activate it on script.js
• Custom feed icon
• Compact and beautiful search block
• Stylesheets files are commented for easy customization
• Plays nice in the administration area.
• Cross-browser tested in IE6/7, Opera, Chrome and Firefox
• Optional border and background from administration
• Grid control for admin during customization
• Four sidebar width alternatives along with custom width override, configurable from theme administration

NOTE: You must install the Zen theme before using this theme! See http://drupal.org/project/zen.

Full documentation on the Zen theme can be found in Drupal's Handbook:
http://drupal.org/node/193318

Excellent documentation on Drupal theming can be found in the Theme Guide:
http://drupal.org/theme-guide

INSTALLATION

1. Download plainGrail from http://drupal.org/project/plaingrail

2. Unpack the downloaded file, take the entire plainGrail folder and place it in your Drupal installation under one of the following locations:

• sites/all/themes
  making it available to the default Drupal site and to all Drupal sites in a multi-site configuration
• sites/default/themes
  making it available to only the default Drupal site
• sites/example.com/themes
  making it available to only the example.com site if there is a sites/example.com/settings.php configuration file

It is better to be placed outside of zen folder for easier upgrade to each!

3. Log in as an administrator on your Drupal site and go to Administer > Site building > Themes (admin/build/themes) and enable plainGrail.

4. Configure at Administer > Site building > Themes(admin/build/themes/settings/plaingrail)
There are several width alternatives to generate dynamically under Theme-specific settings:

• Fixed 140x300
• Fixed 160x220
• Fixed 170x170

Apart from defaults #sidebar-left = 130px and #sidebar-right = 230px

5. If you need any override, rename the provided CSS file (grail-overrides-rename.css ), so that it is never overridden in every upgrade:

grail-overrides-rename.css

change to:

grail-overrides.css

Once you have satisfying widths to your design, you may delete grail-devwidth.css for good

6. Activate it via admin/build/themes/settings/plaingrail or
permanently in your plaingrail.info, by removing semicolon before the line:

;stylesheets[all][] = grail-overrides.css

change to

stylesheets[all][] = grail-overrides.css

IMPORTANT: In Drupal 6, the theme system caches template files and which theme functions should be called. What that means is if you add a new theme or preprocess fuction to your template.php file or add a new template (.tpl.php) file to your sub-theme, you will need to rebuild the "theme registry."

See http://drupal.org/node/173880#theme-registry

BLOCK AND REGIONS

See admin/build/block for visual representation or page.tpl for detailed explanations

Out of the box block supports:
1. Search form, go to admin/build/themes/settings/plaingrail, and enable "Search box"

Modules and misc customizations

See template.php for each usage:

1. maintenance page, see plaingrail_maintenance_page. Go to http://drupal.org/node/195435 if you find trouble
2. feed icon, see plaingrail_feed_icon
3. more_link, see plaingrail_more_link

Other optional functions are removed from the latest release just to make the plaingrail slimmer and more extensible.

LAYOUT CUSTOMIZATIONS

Most of the layout stuffs go to layout.css.
All static and dynamic holy grail techs go to grail-devwidth.css.

Alternative widths to play around:

• Default 130x230
• Fixed 140x300
• Fixed 160x220
• Fixed 170x170

Other optional decorations:

• Change sidebar widths via admin/build/themes/settings/plaingrail
• Remove holy grail borders via admin/build/themes/settings/plaingrail or via grail-devwidth.css

Most decoration stuffs go to plaingrail.css.
Each file are heavily commented for explanation

Grid Control:
Control your layout with the Grid toggle button provided during your dev.
Switch between 24 and 16 columns of Grid, you need to change it in plaingrail.css (.showgrid #page-inner).
It's the last line there.

Feel free to modify any of plainGrail files to suit your need. Comments and explanations are preserved in each of the files and CSS files

1. plaingrail.css:
   * all decorations, administration, tables, and mostly unchanged styles
2. layout.css:
   * all layout stuffs to customize placed here to spot things easier
3. ads.css:
   * advertisement references from "Ad Unit Guidelines" and "Universal Ad Package",
   * disabled by default. You need to enable it in plaingrail.info
4. grail-devwidth:
   * grail-devwidth STYLES, useful for dev purposes only
   * Delete this file for good, or use grail-overrides.css once you have created your columns method

Always visit admin/build/themes/select to clear theme registry,
or activate registry cleaner on theme settings,
or even press key F5, to clear your browser cache

HOLY GRAIL

See http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/ultimate-3-column-blog-style-pixels.htm

Important things to customize width of the columns, sample listed here is taken from grail-170x170.css:

You may reduce padding to total 20px or 10px each side, have a dummy/wireframe first.

The fixed width is set to 960px on #page on layout.css. You can make it fluid by removing 960px from #page, and set margin or padding instead to have white spaces on each side.

Only the properties and values mentioned here are candidates to customize, use it wisely :)
Please note the order of the appearance as well. Do the adjustment one at a time. Give the actual width first, then adjust the position and margin.

I M A G E S

Transparent rss.png is provided if you want to change navbar background color from black to others. Use pngfix.module to help IE6, or else add background color by image editor.

If you have more graphics which can be combined,
embed them in your sprites.png and adjust their background positions accordingly. Currently it holds grid buttons and search background.

Sprite is good to reduce http-requests to your server, so page can be served more quickly.

ADS

It's more usable as references during devs. It's disabled by default.

UPGRADING

Always keep grail-overrides.css and plaingrail.info safe.
Put other custom CSS in your grail-overrides.css

If you have any other better width alternatives you would like to share to drupal community, I will be very happy to include your custom sidebar widths as alternatives in the next release of Plain Grail.

And if you have any question related to this theme, you may use the project page for the issues, or right here for general questions.

Thanks