Posted by Brian294 on October 1, 2008 at 5:29pm
Hey Theme Gurus,
I'm a theme newbie looking for good how-to resources for the theme engine in Drupal 6. I'm just starting to learn PHP, but I've been web programming with other modern OO languages for the past 10 years. I've hacked around with some of the themes freely available on drupal.org to try to learn it myself, but it's proving to be a little overwhelming.
To help myself out, I recently pre-ordered my copy of Drupal 6 Themes, by Ric Shreves, which is due to release any day now. Does anyone know if Ric's previous theme book for Drupal 5 gave a good introduction to themes? Has anyone come across any other resources, such as podcasts or step-by-step tutorials, that give a well-rounded primer to Drupal 6 themes?
Brian
Comments
The Pro Drupal development
The Pro Drupal development book is a good resource for all things Drupal. There isn't a whole lot out there that deals specifically with Drupal 6 theming by way of tutorial or screencast that I know of. It might be advisable to install Drupal 5 just so you can follow along with a lot of the tutorials currently out there.
The Drupal 5 Themes book was great I thought. It's showing it's age already though, zen has changed a lot since for example. Still, it will still give you a good intro to theming in Drupal. Then just read the theme guide on drupal.org, which includes an upgrade guide. http://drupal.org/theme-guide
Of course a thorough knowledge of CSS and XHTML in general is a prerequisite to understanding Drupal themes.
Have you seen smashing magazines recent article on Drupal resources? It's worthy of a bookmark. http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/09/24/drupal-developers-toolbox/
My approach to learning Drupal has been to just read anything and everything pertaining to it.
Have fun.
The screencast for the Theme
The screencast for the Theme Developer module was helpful for me:
http://drupal.org/node/209561
Re: Drupal Developers Toolbox
@rjdempsey - Your suggestion to install Drupal 5 is very appealing considering many of the resources out there were written for that version. BTW, I love the toolbox! I had no idea many of these sites and articles even existed. I would have never known that drupalcodesearch.com ever existed!
I appreciate your input about the Drupal 5 Themes book. I'll be sure to let everyone know if the Drupal 6 Themes book is a good read. :-)
Re: Theme Developer module
@mndonx - Great link! I actually downloaded that module several weeks ago and was simply overwhelmed with all the variable information it was outputting. I put it aside because I couldn't make sense of all the information. But after watching that video, it's helped give me some ideas on how I can actually use this module to change the elements of my template. Thank you!