A recent client wanted to remove everything from the user login page when the site was in maintenance (or Site off-line as its referred to in most system messages and documentation). Just showing the user login form when the site is off-line actually makes a lot of sense because whats the point of showing things like primary links, search block or whatever else might show on your normal user login page.

Its relatively easy to hide content in Drupal using CSS, however its a whole different ball game to hide content and keep it accessible to all site visitors. Disabled web users may be using a screen reader or other Assistive Technology. For Drupal 7 we wanted a way to hide content that worked in all browsers and avoided many of the issues associated with current techniques.

The idea was to develop a new CSS class that could be applied to any element we needed to hide. We called this class .element-invisible and set about testing properties and values to make this work, in all browsers and all AT devices. First lets look at some of the current techniques we looked into and tested for Drupal 7, then I’ll introduce a new technique I came up using the little known clip property and see how it stacks up - I think you’ll be intrigued.

Sometimes its useful to have a page.tpl.php template per node type. While you can have a node-[type].tpl.php be default in Drupal 6, the same does not apply to page level templates.

To add these template suggestions to your theme simply add the following code to template.php, replacing themeName with the name of your theme.