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A customization and theming guide for getting more out of your Drupal site. While you can make a fairly nice site using Drupal core modules, in order to leverage Drupal's built in power you should be somewhat familiar with PHP, MySQL and web design.
Included in this section are PHP and SQL code snippets and examples for use in your sites pages, blocks and themes. There are also a few articles on theming engines, which provide the infrastructure to build and create new themes.
Note: Feel free to add handbook pages that are relevant to this section. They go into the moderation queue for review and approval.
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A large portion of the work in creating a drupal site is picking which modules fits your vision for your website. Whether you want WYSIWYG editing, picures,
Theming is the Drupal term for changing the look and feel of your site. It can be achieved in a variety of ways, listed below in order of difficulty and flexibility. Keep this list in mind when you browse through this section. If you find yourself reaching into the more advanced areas when trying to achieve a certain look or design, please be aware that there is a learning curve associated with each difficulty level. Feel free to ask questions in the Theming and Design forum.
Novice / Easy / Limited modifications
1) Picking and Installing a prebuilt theme from our drupal theme gallery
2) Adding simple CSS Tricks and modifications to your favourite themes, changing colour pallets and fonts
Intermediete / Requires rudimentary background in web coding & design
3) Adding phptemplate theme snippets, which are blocks of code written in PHP, to modify the behaviour of your site, includes adding new sections, presenting information in different ways, etc
4) Using modules such as panels, views, and actions to dramatically alter what's shown on your website.
Advanced / Deep understanding of semantic web design, CSS and Javascript interactions
5) Adding javascript to your website for interactivity, using jquery for effects and beautification (SiFR, etc)
6) Changing the template engine, or altering phptemplate for your own use
Expert Level / Creating & packaging your own themes
8) Best practices for the web designer new to Drupal
understanding the mess of classes - they are auto generated
plumbing the depths of the form_alter
9) Theming for Drupal veterans
10) Creating php or sql to alter Drupal core