Drupal minus Drupal visual style = ?
the_jay - May 31, 2007 - 16:43
Hi,
We are using Drupal to create a site with buddies, groups, PMs, etc. All the Drupal functions are really useful, however I am running into a fundamental problem that we are hoping someone can help me out with.
While we love the functions in Drupal, we dont want any of the graphical support. We have a setup for the page layouts, coded with css and html, and want to add php to the files that call these drupal functions. Is this possible?
All we need is the drupal kernel, not the gui. Can we use drupal, without really really using the visual side of drupal?
Any help would be very much appreciated...
Thanks
Jay
You have almost total
You have almost total control of how everything in Drupal looks. So you can use your own html/css styles for everything. You just need to create a theme.
theme based
drupal is a theme/template based system. The look is separated from the functionality. Here are a couple links to help you create your own theme to use in drupal...
http://drupal.org/node/43767
http://drupal.org/phptemplate
--
Matt
http://www.mattfarina.com
Paradigm shift
You're thinking of a system like WordPress or Movable Type or ExpressionEngine, where you just use template-tags to pull content from the database. These are known as "pull-templated" CMSes; the systems themselves don't know anything about the structure of your page, and they wait for you to pull data into your own structures.
Drupal is completely different. It's a "push-templated" CMS. Drupal knows about the elements of your page, structures the HTML for one element, and "pushes" that info to its parent element. Lather, rinse, repeat, all the way until it pushes everything into an all-encompassing full-page template.
This does NOT mean it's unusable for your situation, though. You just need to learn about theming, and carefully cut, paste, and refactor your mock-ups into Drupal theme files, overriding modules' built-in theme functions.
If you absolutely positively have to use the template-tag–based approach, Drupal is not the CMS for you right now. But if you want to learn the Drupal way, there're tons of folks here who can help you way better than I can. :)
HTH and good luck.