By moegreen on

Description

I am a new designer/developer, and new to drupal, and I need help in designing my projects. I have designed few websites on Garland and Sky themes; I think they are the best choice, however, my clients are demanding more than just a CMS, a fully designed site. Please check the following examples: I could alternatively design and develop the few pages of landing and use drupal for all the Wiki, blog, forum and other fun stuff. I am trying to do all this on Drupal preferably. Please let me know of any ways to accomplish this task, any book references, or anything i can do to super design the drupal sites. Please reply back and share ideas as I am counting on Drupal community support. Should I follow component based engineering where I can build the design pages in dreamweaver, in design and photoshop and then use drupal for everything else.

voip.com
telonline.com
Teloip.com

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Andy Britton’s picture

Andy Britton commented

Are you asking about workflow or how people design sites using Drupal for everything from page content to forums, blogs etc?

If the first I think most people tend to design sites either in Fireworks or Photoshop at concept stage and then slice the designs into a coded theme which is built with something like Dreamweaver or Eclipse.

If the second, the whole point of the templating system Drupal uses means you have a solid design that can be used across a variety of content types as either the overall "theme" to your site or as a foundation to build from if certain page elements need to change per page. In terms of designing single html pages which is what I think you were asking, replace the word "page" with "node" and this is how Drupal works. You can build entire websites with each node being it's own seperate page which removes the need to code a single html page once the theme has been developed, the rest is mostly done backend which is the benefit to using a CMS. Drupal isn't just limited to being used as a blog, wiki or forum and I've never come across a situation where Drupal couldn't do the job and had to build single html pages for certain content.

I stopped developing html only websites a few years ago as I can build a theme in the same amount of time it takes me to code a pure html design and can control the layout on the fly with the block system Drupal uses. I recommend Drupal to everyone I work for even on small 4 page brochure sites as to me it's futureproofing a clients website.

Hopefully that's of some use and not just a random rant.

Best regards

Andy

moegreen’s picture

moegreen commented

hey Andy,

Thanks for you reply. Do you recommend some books, and give some practical advice meaning some instruction to get the job done please. You know what I mean, if you dont mind sharing the edits you are making to Drupal theme or changing it by downloading it to your local computer and editing certain file in the theme? Please advise.

Thank you,

Andy Britton’s picture

Andy Britton commented

Book wise any of the Packt Publishing titles are a good start, reading through the documentation on drupal.org is another great resource most people use even just to reference things.

For editing themes or creating them from scratch it depends whether your going to work live in a develoment directory or setup a localhost environment on your machine and upload the theme once completed. I do both depending on the size and type of site and how much time I have for development. You can download wamp, lamp or the mac alternative for an easy to use local environemnt so mysql, php and apache are all run on your computer. I use Zend Server CE as I'm a tart when it comes to looks plus you can do alot of edits to config files from a GUI rather than having to go rooting through the files.

Another way that I know a friend of mine used to learn theme building which I find may be more practical to newbies was to create a theme directory and then use the theme files found under root/modules/system and then copy and paste certain elements in and create his own from that. Bit of a hackers way to learn theming but it may be a more hands on way of learning.

Check out youtube and the stuff the Lullabot guys produce in terms of videos, you could also try lynda.com. There's loads of resources out there, google is your friend.

Regards

Andy

nicl’s picture

nicl commented

I'm a new developer but I use Fireworks for visual design as it allows multiple pages (including master pages and shared layers), symbols (shared elements), and styles (allowing css-like styling options, ie. style all headers with H1 and then I can change them all with one click rather than having to manually edit them all as in photoshop).

For the actual coding (html/css), I use a simple text-editor - but just go with whatever you find easiest.

Using the 960 grid system (or another grid system) can speed up more complex designs where you need to quickly create column-based layouts. The Panels module is also helpful with this, although I don't use it much personally.

Chapter Three (a Drupal developer) have some good blogs on this, including some Fireworks templates which are a good starting point for a Drupal design:

http://www.chapterthree.com/blog/nica_lorber/design_drupal_template_appr...
http://www.chapterthree.com/greyboxing

(together these form parts 1 and 2 of an article)