Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling
Product Description
In Detail
Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.
Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system’s front and back-end interfaces.
Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of , written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website.
Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.
What you will learn from this book?
- Learn about the Drupal 6 Theming Architecture
- Find and install new themes
- Get the most from Drupal’s theme configuration system
- Create a new theme from scratch
- Master PHPTemplate
- Modify the default templates and styles
- Override the default templates with your own
- Create dynamic styling which responds to the content or the user
- Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient
Approach
This book helps you understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.
Who this book is written for?
The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity – you don’t need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system.
Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.
Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way.
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5 Responses to “Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling”
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I recently read Drupal 6 Themes, by Ric Shreves – a partner at design and development firm Water&Stone. I found the book to be a great resource.
Drupal 6 Themes Lately I have been digging further into Drupal, an open source content management platform that describes itself lightheartedly as “community plumbing.” This plumbing has been used to power many high profile sites, which all have their own distinct look and feel. It appeals to me because it’s more powerful than simple blogging software, but with that comes a bit of complexity. Thankfully, it is actually quite intuitive once one makes sense of how it works.
This allows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of design. Looking at sites that use Drupal reads like a veritable who’s-who of technology / innovation…
* csail.mit.edu
* fastcompany.com
* infoworld.com
* linuxfoundation.org
* recovery.gov
* research.nokia.com
While some have criticized Drupal in the past as being difficult for designers to customize, and that was probably a valid concern (at the time), the latest version is quite designer friendly – made so via the PHPTemplate engine that is built into the system. While it is “just” PHP, it is quite a bit simpler in terms of building templates than writing out raw code long-hand. So one could say, it is as designer friendly as other systems that rely on PHP for templating.
Shreves did a great job covering all that is possible within Drupal, from a design standpoint. He begins by explaining how the inner workings of the system fit together, and how this allows for a designer to override and tweak everything. He then shows how to take an existing theme and build a sub-theme.
Of course, this is all just a precursor to chapter 7 and beyond, where Shreves really shines, showing you how to build your own fully customized themes. That’s not to downplay the importance of the foundational material, as the earlier chapters build well upon each other. I am simply saying I found the chapters on doing your own design from scratch especially inspiring.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to any code savvy web designers who are looking to take their skills to the next level with a full-fledged content management system. With newly acquired skills, you will be able to confidently tackle enterprise scale projects, building upon the versatility of Drupal.
Rating: 5 / 5
Drupal 6 Themes is great if you are a themer who needs a bit of a push to move forward with your themeing skills. I would say that most everything in the book can be found with Google but I like books and having things brought together in one place.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have read most of the book and it is easy to read. The first few chapters are a good review of Drupal and how it works, for me Chapter 6 is where the meat of the book begins.
I would recommend this to anyone wanting to understand more about Drupal theming.
Rating: 5 / 5
This book provides a comprehensive overview of Drupal themes. While it does work as a good reference in case you want to go back and look up something, I cannot say for sure it has a nice flow built into it or was that much fun to read. It did seem a bit repetitive. However, if you are interested in knowing how theming works in Drupal, this book does the job of covering it in detail.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have been learning Drupal on my own for the last three months or so. I picked up this book because I wanted to learn how to theme custom menus so that my themes could have buttons. I figured a 300+ page book just about theming would have at least some information on how to theme your menu since I couldn’t seem to find that information online anywhere. I was wrong. The author skims over the subject completely and seems to just be regurgitating all the information that is already available on the [...] website (which isn’t very extensive at all). I swear I read parts where it almost seems copy and pasted from the online documentation.
In addition, the author spends 45 pages listing off possible candidate php files to make changes to how certain things are displayed, but doesn’t give any explanation on how to take advantage of that information. It feels to me like he was just trying to take this book beyond 300 pages and threw that in at the last minute.
Overall, I was very disappointed by this book. Everything I learned could have been covered in 20 pages. I wish there were better alternative books on the market. The first couple of chapters may be useful for a total beginner who just wants to learn how the Drupal 6 theming system works. For anyone that already gets how a theme works, and wants to take the next step to creating real professional themes, this book is useless.
Rating: 1 / 5