Drupal Themes For Beginners

[Dr. Gufran]

Drupal Themes For Beginners
By Jeff Agres
If you haven't heard of a CMS then your probably doing web sites the old fashioned way. You take a bunch of HTML throw it together, maybe give it some style through CSS, and you publish it. A great looking but static website.

This is where the CMS or content management system comes in and this is why Drupal is the cream of the crop of content management systems. With Drupal you can build crazy websites with all the bells and whistles. Your own Myspace or Facebook. Maybe a heavy video site or something to that nature. The only problem with using Drupal is that, at least for beginners, they can't get the site to look great. They use what Drupal calls its themes to give it its look and feel. This is what your supposed to do. The only thing is, Drupal doesn't yet have a huge theme base to choose from and its paid themes well, your not sure what your going to get. So you have a couple of options.

First you can search online for free themes. Great idea, if you look hard enough you will probably find something that fits what you need. It might not be exactly what you need though. So In that case you could modify the theme to your likings. This is where people get nervous. Most feel like they need to be an expert to change the themes for Drupal or that if they mess with them they could screw up the site. This is simply not true, at least if you do theming the way its intended.

Drupal is setup to allow webmasters or themers to make all the changes they need to their look and feel of the site without ever messing with any core files. They pass all the php and once its ready to spit stuff out it checks with your own personal but separate theme folder. This is where you add your own files and in a sense you are just overwriting the output into a format you like.

So to get a little better understanding of what the theme is, it is basically a set of template files, mostly html with a little php. Go ahead find a theme you like put in in your sites, all, themes folder and mess with the code. Open up all the files, there typically isn't that many. Usually a node.tpl.php and a page.tpl.php a CSS file normally called style.css. and an info file. There are a few others but you will get the idea.

Try opening up the page.tpl.php in a text editor. Look its just HTML and a few php snippets. This is the layout of your pages and its the basic idea behind your whole theme. Take a look at all the files and try to grasp what is going on. With a little work you will have the basics of theming down for Drupal in no time.

Get more information on Drupal theming or download some free drupal themes at drupalthemesonly.com. Your best resource for Drupal design.

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