I been with drupal for quite some time, havent used other cms's on market but often i heard D is one of most harder to do and learn. Compering to WP for example i was often tempted to try and learn wp as sometimes it seem development of sites was too slow in drupal and in the end its all about time.
What i wanted to write is, recently i made my first page with panels, and wanted to outsource theming, had many applicants on odesk, but when they saw all the divs most of them gave up, some quit and in the end i will have to do im myself. They are not drupal themers, maybe just plain css or wp css themeres as i can see from their credentials, but i was suprised with this. Guessing its just a price of modularity? but as some of them offered to build html, i was thinking would it be less expensive to build custom html and then just insert modules in appropriate places, i would get css for less effort, wouldnt need to build complex panels. Then again from my experience, i have build one site like that, and expanding it with new features was a drag.
In the end just wondering other people thoughts on this subject, is HTML and millions of divs in theming system best approach? I got used to it, with firebug i can make things rather nicely but hard to get some quality/low cost outsource for theming.
Comments
There are a few different
There are a few different ways to approach this.
--You could use panels and create your own panels layout. I believe there is documentation about how to do that.
--You could build your own theme.
Whatever you do, in my opinion, it's best to build your own stuff if you can. I try to avoid panels as much as possible because of all of the divs it generates. Views generates some unwanted divs as well but it's easy to fix that through the templates provided.
A relatively light weight theme that I start with is the framework theme. It has three columns but if I don't need all three I just remove the code I don't need.
If you need any help, please use my contact form on here and I will try to help you as best as I can.
Thanks
I agree .. the HTML mark-up
I agree .. the HTML mark-up that Drupal produces can be fully controlled.
If you create a custom theme - you can make sure that content is output using a minimal number of elements, and that everything is structured semantically and logically. AFAIK, you can even control the output of your panels HTML using custom tpl.php templates (http://drupal.org/node/334209).
The creation of a custom theme could make a huge difference when it comes to creating a CSS based skin, and could also help your site's general efficiency because a lot of extraneous mark-up will end up being stripped. It really is a good way forward.
Best of luck :)