By mahatm on

What is the best way to start building a custom theme for Drupal? I read in the comments of the theme documentation section that XTemplate is not a good choice- why? It seems a much more logical alternative to the large ammounts of PHP code. Where can I read more?

Comments

joe@www.joepilot.net’s picture

joe@www.joepilot.net commented

I found it easiest to pick apart the chameleon theme. It is fairly simple and very easy to change to suit your methods. The most important functions is going to be the themename_page function since it draws the borders and such.

CmdrGravy’s picture

CmdrGravy commented

I started messing with the Chameleon theme and found once I'd had a good look at it it was very simple to alter to my tastes.

Just altering the stylesheets for chameleon can give you a wide range of options and then if you need more and are comfortable with PHP it's easy to customise the chameleon.theme file to get everything exactly how you like.

I haven't yet looked at any of the other themes ( because Chameleon did everything I wanted it to ) so I can't really compare it with them.

robertdouglass’s picture

robertdouglass commented

If you simply want to change the look, layout, style and visual presentation of a theme, it doesn't really matter whether you base it on XTemplate or PHPTemplate. Both have HTML templates that you can change as you wish. Both have stylesheets that you can alter. The only reason you would need to change the underlying code in either would be to add new functionality (information that isn't presented). Describe your goals for the new theme and you'll probably get better suggestions for help.

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net

mahatm’s picture

mahatm commented

Sorry for the large time delay in replying.
My most recent work has been in Plone and Textpattern. With Plone I'm used to having full control over the whole site from content to presentation, down to the individual portlets (content boxes in the left and right columns: I don't know what term Drupal uses for them). Thanks for your help: I'll take a closer look into the templates.

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

content blocks in the left and right columns are called Blocks. Default you get right/left. With a custom theme, you can put them anywhere.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

amiroff’s picture

amiroff commented

I for example prefer Xtemplate system because I can edit and modify anything with Dreamweaver or by hand without php knowledge.

I first took bluemarine theme, renamed that and began modifying both xtml file and style.css style sheet. If you're good at CSS then you can come up with pretty clean and beautiful design.

See what I made from blumarine here: http://www.linux.gen.az.

So my advice is go with xtemplate and modify it like you want.

lazydave21’s picture

lazydave21 commented

i started with xtemplate and found it suprisingly easy to modify and get the look that i wanted

this is my site > www.justride.co.uk

it was certaintly easier than other cms's that i tried, adn was one of my reasons for choosing drupal

what are the differences between phptemplate and xtemplate?