All the new themes from November are, unfortunately, fixed width. Travel is the pick of the bunch for those planning their holidays.

New themes

Agua is fixed width with two sidebars that do not line up.
A Sync is fixed width with a single sidebar on the left.
Autumn Almanac is fixed width with two sidebars, one on each side.

Cleanr is fluid width to fit the wide administration pages.
Drupal Travel is fixed width with a single sidebar on the right.
Extended is fixed width with a single sidebar on the left and bright colours.
Enlight is fixed width with a single sidebar on the right and a semi transparent drop down menu.
Gardening is fixed width with a single sidebar on the right.
Hariyali is green, fixed width, green, with a sidebar each side and lots of green regions.

Powerful Pink is fixed with with one sidebar on the left and a lot of pink.
Spring Theme is fixed width with one sidebar on the left.
Sunset is fixed width with three column and a sidebar on each side.
SynFox is fixed width with one, two, or three columns and 16 regions.

There are another 20 new themes to be installed in the next few weeks.

Da theme

D-theme for da site: Christmas
Christmas is based on Aardvark, An Adaptible Reliable Detailed Valid Architected theme Anyone can Recolour with a little Knowledge.

Aardvark started years ago when CSS first appeared. Over the years a variety of improvements reflected the adoption of improved CSS support in Web browsers. The most recent review was a comparison with the Basic theme because Basic reduces the junk in front of the content. CSS still does not provide reliable vertical positioning of the type needed to put content first in themes with variable height. Aardvark settles for the fixed header height used in a lot of themes including Basic.

Perhaps the CSS people will role CSS 3 out the door then start work on fixing CSS instead of just complicating CSS. CSS 4 might bring relative positioning based on ids.

Christmas

The Christmas theme started as a way to demonstrate the power of SVG.

In many parts of Australia, Christmas is the time of the year is when you light the barbecue or fight bush fires. Spraying Santa snow on the windows seems stupid when the windows will soon be covered with ash. That weird hat associated with Santa Claus has the type of high visibility required in fire fighting equipment. If you have the hat made of genuine wool, it insulates your head against the heat of the fires and resists burning. Cheap poly plastic microfibre hats from toy shops turn your head into an incendiary flare.

SVG

SVG, Scalable Vector Graphics, is something wasted on illustrators. Web designers should be all over SVG and Inkscape. If you are not using Inkscape, you are wasting money. If you are paying Web designers and they are not Inkscaping, you are wasting money. Working on the inside, I see endless occasions when someone is paid thousands of dollars to perform a one minute change because they did not use Inkscape to produce what Inkscape is good at. The customer receives a JPEG file instead of a JPEG and the base SVG. The customer has to pay the designer an exorbitant fee to get the same JPEG file in a slightly different size.

To make matters worse, the designers often do not know that they could have used SVG. Lots of Web site developers perform design as only a tiny part of the Web site building process but still pay thousands of dollars for Adobe products to perform the work. In most cases Gimp and Inkscape perform the same work without the expense. Gimp is probably less of a problem. People know about Gimp and can compare Gimp to Photoshop. If you have raw images from professional cameras, you have images that exceed the current Gimp 8 bit limit. Inkscape and SVG are so unknown that people are not comparing or even considering them.

Simplenews

D-theme decided da newsletter should use Simplenews. The E-publish module was tried as the newsletter management system but is oriented to building complex publications and requires Send, a module containing bugs. Simplenews does everything needed at D-theme and nothing that is not needed. Simplenews also has a range of add on modules for things D-theme might need in the future.