Theme development

Hi, my employer is in the process of developing and deploying six Drupal based websites. Quite a bit of the work needs sub'ed out and I am preferring members of the Drupal community.

As stated in the title, we will be working with Template development (we provide the graphic design), Organic Groups, and Econ along with the other usual suspects. We will also need to slurp data from an existing forum in to OG and use Econ / user profiles for an application on demand access control.

The newly minted 'Zen Task Force' may provide some great project orientated learning opportunities in realm of theming. Seems like it would tie in quite nicely as an extension to the great Dojo theming lesson as well as our work on Merlin's 'Themer Pack Project'?

Project: Website redesign and production for Non-profit

Description: looking for a mentor for implementation of Website redesign within the Drupal content management system. I am a web designer and producer with fairly in-depth knowledge of web design and production techniques (XHTML, CSS and some javascript) and very basic working knowledge of PHP, phpMyAdmin, and Drupal. I have taken Lullabot’s Theming course (SF – October) and this is my first project using Drupal.

The website is for a non-profit that produces initiation weekends for young men ages 13 – 20. You can see their current website at www.ymuw.org. The redevelopment of their site will consist of two phases.

... and so on.

We currently have a very fuzzy "tree" that builds our site. I doubt anyone has ever traced the route a string takes from within some Drupal-module 'till its printed.

Some theme functions call other theme functions, whom call other theme functions. Sometimes inbetween you find that Drupal APIs are called.

theme_some_hierarchy() {
  $hierarchy = build_hierarchy()
  foreach ($hierarchy as $subtree) {
    theme('hierarchy_part', $hierarchy, $subtree);
  }
}

Freely crafted after our menu building systems, and just an example.

Recently Dries said he disliked theme functions calling theme functions. This is done all over the place. Maybe we need to look at a solution for this? Something to either get a very consistent page building mechanism (brickslate is an idea to do this after the way JS builds the DOM) . Maybe we need to only create a conceptual guideline. And maybe we need not worry at all and continue trialling-erroring our way to our Perfect Designs.

Hi there,

As you can read on my blog, I am building another solid base for a theme, WhatsinItsName. In the second blogpost I explain in more detail what that base will be about. For thowe who know microformats: this will be more if a huge microformat, making your HTML actually meaningfull!

For once, it is not about a CSS frame, but about a very solid, standardised HTML with standard, predicatble (and actually usable :) classes and IDs. It should be a frame where you can drop a huge range of CSS on top of, and see a nice theme emerge. Think about the source HTML of CSS zengarden, only more aimed at Real World Sites :)