Beginners Guide to Theming

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
damian-gdo's picture

Hi all,
I've been trying to design my own theme. Can anybody recommend a basic guide to theming on Drupal 6 - the more basic the better. Idiot proof is best. Any suggestions welcome.
Cheers,
Damian

Comments

Zen theme

stevepurkiss's picture

Hi Damian,

Have you played around with the Zen theme? It has a great 'starter kit' and set of instructions to follow in order to create a fixed or flexible width theme:

http://drupal.org/project/zen

There are a couple of other similar kits around.

Let us know how it goes...

Genesis

stevepurkiss's picture

I remembered the name of the other one to try:

http://drupal.org/project/genesis

Thanks for the help, Steve.

damian-gdo's picture

Thanks for the help, Steve. I started with the Zen theme, then I got caught up with the Advanced Theme Construction Kit, which I hoped would be a fast track to a brilliant theme but found it rather confusing, so I'm going back to Zen. Not heard of Genesis so will try that too. What do you think about the idea of doing a workshop on theming? Cheers.

Theming cheat sheet

stevepurkiss's picture

Hi Damian,

Just seen http://twitter.com/hashdrupal tweet this Drupal theming cheat sheet, thought it might be of use:

http://ow.ly/aowp

If you are proficient with

jamestombs's picture

If you are proficient with HTML and CSS. I just create the page.tpl.php file and create the whole layout without any PHP, adding in some lipsum for the drupal content. Then once I am happy with the page I slowly start taking out the lipsum and adding in the PHP adding in theme overrides in template.php where needed to get the required result.

I have a book called Drupal 5 Themes, written by Ric Sheeves which is fairly basic and gives you all the different varaibles available in node.tpl.php and page.tpl.php etc, I assume there will be one for Drupal 6...Yes there is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Drupal-Themes-Create-Powerful-Styling/dp/1847195...

James Tombs

_

Jason Dean's picture

Another new book worth exploring is Front End Drupal...

As long as you have a basic understanding of HTML and CSS, this book explains the Drupal 6 theme concept pretty well. It also has some suggestions for using starter themes like Zen.

Brighton

Group categories

Group notifications

This group offers an RSS feed. Or subscribe to these personalized, sitewide feeds:

Hot content this week