Hello! It was nice to meet all of you at the last meetup, and I am sorry I couldn't stay for dinner. I look forward to the next meetup. John's presentation was very impressive, I don't know Javascript coding at all, but as an end user, I can see how this library will be extremely beneficial to Drupal in the future.
I have been a drupal user for about a year and a half, and I am pretty comfortable with setting up my own installations and managing a drupal site. What I don't know much about is theming, and I really need some help. My site in question is www.charlesriverskatepark.org . It is a community installation for the Charles River Skatepark Project, a 40,000 square foot custom concrete skateboard park to be built underneath the Zakim Bridge.
As you will see, I have an existing installation up and running, its just not much to look at. I have a graphic designer as well to do the visuals, I just need someone with drupal theming experience to show me/teach me/do some work for me. Hourly or small project basis, open for discussion. Please contact me through my site, www.charlesriverskatepark.org , if you are interested in helping. We are an official non-profit too, if you are looking for a tax-deductable donation of services!
Comments
I am also new to Drupal, but will pass on what I know...
Boy wish I could have made that meetup - I had something else I had to do.
I am also new to Drupal, but will pass on what I know about theming.
There are two major ways that I know of to modify a theme:
1 - Modify the CSS.
2 - Modify the theme template files.
And one way that I don’t know much about:
3 - Modify the theme’s ‘template.php’ file.
But 1 and 2 does everything I have needed to do so far.
NOTE: It looks like you are currently using the Chameleon theme - #2 and #3 does not apply to that theme because it is not a theme based on PHPTemplate. I recommend using a PHPTemplate theme. Maybe try ‘Burnt’. However, all the CSS (#1) stuff still applies, which may do all you need to do.
CSS:
The CSS controls the look of all but the most major portions of the layout. By “major” I mean if you want a two column layout instead of three column – that requires going into the template files.
The CSS comes from two places:
a. There is a ‘drupal.css” file in the ‘misc’ folder which controls CSS of many common (small) items. I have not yet had the need to change this, although it is possible to do so (OR you can override a style in drupal.css by putting the style in your theme css file).
b. There is a CSS file in the folder that contains your theme (e.g. /themes/bluemarine/style.css) It is that CSS file where the action is. You want to go in and modify that file. Note that if the CSS requires images, you obviously need to create/modify images as well.
I can’t really tell you all about CSS in this comment, that’s for sure, but I highly recommend this book: http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/ . It is by far the best written book on all the CSS that I have ever read (or on web design in general for that matter). Read this book (not a hard read) and you will know everything you need to know. The code for everything discussed in the book is included.
To figure out where CSS styles are used in the page, I usually simply view-source the page to see what page elements use what styles. So by going back and forth between the page, view-source and making changes to the CSS file, a lot can be done.
Template Files:
Look inside your theme folder and you will see some template files (not for Chameleon, look at Bluemarine) At a minimum you should see 'page.tpl.php’ and you may see others, like ‘node.tpl.php’. Open the ‘page.tpl.php’ and you will see the basic structure for every page on your site.
It you look at the code in ‘page.tpl.php’ for Bluemarine, you will understand the structure – you will see the tables for content and columns, etc… You can play with it by modified the tables. Try it out. This is where you can make major “structural” changes to the page(s).
I know you can also create different ‘page.tpl.php’ files for use in various places. For example, you can create ‘page-admin.tpl.php’ to use on all admin pages. You need to modify ‘template.php’ to make that work. See this: http://drupal.org/node/52389
OK that’s about all I know. Email me if you want more help (rick@flowmediadesign.com). Above all else, get that book – it will take you maybe 1-2 days at most and you will then know CSS good enough to do a lot.
Rick
Great reply.
Great reply.
Dan's book is great, as was his previous one. I also liked CSS Mastery which fills out a few things such as the section on the 'visual formatting model'.
By way of a not so shameless plug... as part of our series on developerWorks, we have a couple of articles coming out next month (I think) on theming in Drupal. The first deals with using the phptemplate engine to structure the XHTML and the second talks about the CSS techniques we used. Hope these will be useful.
I'm new to this group and yet to attend a meetup but perhaps a talk by Jeff Robbins and Ted Serbinski from Lullabot on theming for a future one? Just a thought.
-alb
Developer Works
Those developer works articles are great. I noticed them before when they were mentioned in posts at http://drupal.org/planet - thanks for doing those.
Thanks - other interesting resources?
Total pleasure. Hope they help. We wanted to give something back the community. I hope we can help in other ways too. Actually, we welcome any comments on the articles since I, at least, feel like I'm still learning. Currently finding CCK, Views, Actions and the Workgroup modules very interesting after some hints from Jeff Robbins and his great podcasts on Lullabot. Be glad to hear of any other useful resources if folk are kind enough to share.
I used firebug to find out
I used firebug to find out what elements of an existing template I can modify via style.css.. Very useful!
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