theming

 Giving a response to an AJAX call is actually quite easy. The server receives a request, the server returns something. End.

Now, imagine you don't just want a response, you want to give a response that goes through all the ImpressCMS process, including the template engine. Permissions, Protector, Custom tags, Smarty, everything. A bit more difficult, but not too much.

 It can happen to you. You need one block to be different from the others. And I mean “different”, you know what I mean? It needs a big fat lot of exclusive CSS just for itself.

You need a way to point your CSS just to this block.

 You know, you can close a Drupal site anytime for maintenance, don't you? You just go to "Administration -> Site configuration -> Site maintenance" and deactivate the site. From this moment on, no-one can see your website while you're working at it.

Many designers are currently moving from print to web these days. Of those many, a big part decide to focus on design and pay someone to make the HTML+CSS coding part. While this sounds like a wise strategy that let designers focus on what they do best, if they don’t bother to learn the limits of the web, they’ll soon pay the price with interests. Without realising it, they boycott themselves too often, making things harder to code. That means more time, more problems and probably a higher price on the coding side.

As you can see in this very article, there's a TweetMeme widget to the right. It's pretty convenient, as it allows any user to post your content to Twitter. And you get this just by installing and configuring the TweetMeme module. Ain't it cool? You get the widget located at the beginning of your node's content. Always. No matter where you really want the widget to be. No matter if you want the widget to be in any other place.

Ummm... that sounds a bit less cool.

So what? What can we do?

You can change the default templates of a module without modifying the original files. This process is known as "template overriding". Here's the process:

ImpressCMS (1.2 Upwards) can resize images automatically if you tell it what images and where to put them. You just need to insert a Smarty tag in your design where you want the resized image to be.

UPDATED: You can download an updated version of this plugin (1.11, december 22, 2010), including some bugfixes.