Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Step 4: Single Node Pages with Sidebars

The point of starting off your template with a node page that doesn’t have sidebars is this: you will inevitably have a page like this somewhere on your site. And many designers, well-meaning as they are, end up forgetting this and assume there will be 1–2 sidebars on the page. As Drupal’s default behavior reflows the text to fill the entire page when there are no sidebars, this results in these pages having long and drastically uncomfortable line lengths.

That said, it’s safe to assume that most pages will have at least one sidebar, and that the sidebars will contain different types of blocks, for example:

• A list of node titles or categories

• Static text or images

• A tag cloud or something similar

• Callout boxes, like a contact form or customer testimonial

Therefore, while I’m working on my node pages, I should also take a look at how these different types of sidebar blocks will be styled, and how I’ll set up both one- and two-sidebar layouts. I’ll use my two-sidebar layout as my blog post page, and set up a “recent entries” block, tag cloud, and “about the blog” description block. Because presentations end up being a large part of my work, I’ll also put a “recent presentations” block in the right sidebar, with images. This will give me the opportunity to create styles for other blocks that include images. Figure 7-6 shows the result.

Figure 7-6. Our ...