Meta Theme

I love Drupal as a content managment system, but the default themes it comes with are pretty staid. TWiT.tv - which runs Drupal - is currently based on the Push Button theme that ships with Drupal. Creating a theme from scratch is no mean feat, which is why I've hired Lullabot to do the coding on Arktyp's design for the new TWiT.tv. I could never have done it myself. I had planned to get Drupal installed here with a plain generic template and then update the site to match Leoville.com and Leo.am. But then I found this template, meta theme, from Ken Collins. I installed it as a placeholder, but it's so slick I decided to keep it. The theme has some really neat non-obvious features like a gorgeous photo album template and a wild syntax colored code block format which is great for programmers. I'll probably fiddle with it a bit -- the font size is a little too tiny for my taste, and I'm not crazy about the funny little right quote things next to all the links -- but it's pretty gorgeous, and it turns out to be totally valid XHTML and CSS. Drupal represents my fifth blogging engine. I started with Noah Grey's Grey Matter in 2001, moved to Movable Type when that program was still in beta, followed Ben and Mena to Typepad, then used Expression Engine for a couple of years. I've been using Drupal for a year at TWiT.tv and have come to think of it as the premiere content management system due to its super clean code base and very extensive third party module support. Migrating six hundred entries and thousands of comments from system to system hasn't been easy. Expression Engine to Drupal offered the most tricky conversion even though both use MySQL for the data. Fortunately I found an excellent script by Tarek which worked pretty much out of the box. So here we are. A new content management system, new incentive to keep posting here, and some neat new features like forums, polling, and a photo gallery. I hope you like the look of the new place and you'll make yourself at home. I'm hoping to write a script to migrate the Expression Engine user database over here, but until I do you'll have to register to post comments. Sorry to have to do that but it's the only effective way to prevent blog spam. Let me know what you think! And thanks for visiting.