By Anonymous (not verified) on

I am now ready to create my own theme.

I am told that with Panels you don't need to create a theme page.tpl.php.

I used to use Dreamweaver (until I saw the light of Drupal!) and I have had to force myself not to do manual coding and to understand and use things like pagemanager, views ...

I was reading panels (http://drupal.org/project/panels) and it said this:

The layout builder is nice for visually designing a layout, but a real HTML guru doesn't want the somewhat weighty HTML that this will create. Modules and themes can provide custom layouts that can fit a designer's exacting specifications, but still allow the site builder to place content wherever you like.

DOES THIS STATEMENT MEAN IT IS BETTER TO CODE YOUR OWN THEME page.tpl.php?

Thanks

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

You still need a page.tpl.php, it controls the over all page layout.

Panels can be used for the content area to create more complex layouts.

iandickson’s picture

iandickson commented

Likal uses Pixture Reloaded as the Theme, and thus the Blocks and Panels controls the layout in the Content area.

The advantage of this approach is that it makes experimenting/changing very easy as once real content exists you'll def want to mess around quite a lot with the content area, even if you have pretty much settled on the rest.

see www.gloucester.likal.com

FWIW almost every Panel page is built out of View Panes