Noob Frustrations - More Step by Step, less theory?

check out the themeing tutorials on lullabot.com, drupaldojo.com and the like. there are also video casts on themeing to help you visually. Keep in mind that there aren't many/if any tutorials about Drupal 6 yet, as this hasn't been released as stable yet. Production sites should be using Drupal 5.x which is more stable then 6.x and has many more modules already available.

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My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

Hi Dagorian
Have you checked out the zen theme as a starting point of your design could make your task easier.

I admit the Drupal community is int user friendly and a major amount of the users who submit content and write tutorials tend to forget to be user friendly and this is a real shame and an annoyance , I have struggled myself to learn as much as I can about Drupal because it is an uphill battle and are lucky that my employers have the patience with me as I learn the system, one good tip I can give you is that using google to search Drupal for information much easier and faster than using Drupals search engine also if you wana find working modules to use in Drupal 6 this page will be useful http://groups.drupal.org/node/5036.

If you need help just keep asking and you should get some good feedback.

I create a new directory and make myself an .info file. Now I keep reading, and re-reading. template.php next? page.tpl.php? I want to start with my header - centered on the page according to my CSS file. Wait a minute, I've got 2 CSS files - a layout and a styles. other pages have different layout CSS files...I'm confused. Ok, I scratch my current process and open up the theme for Garland - and stare at a few of the pages. I'm lost.

I learned a lot by comparing and contrasting themes. From a theming perspective, bluemarine, chameleon and pushbutton are all simpler than garland.

Personally, I like using the zen theme as a base theme and it's quite well-documented and serves as a good comparison to garland.

See : http://drupal.org/node/11774

There are a lot ways to do things in drupal - some better than others and some easier than others. It's a bit like cooking, that way. Figuring my way around customizing blocks and block regions defined in page.tpl.php in connection with the related css files made the most sense to me when I was starting out.

And the Site recipes in the handbook and the HowTo's and Beginner's Cookbook leading up to it are all very good references.

And probably more relevant -- some theme how-tos

..and HowTo: build your frontpage with regions

I sympathize, but here's the big problem.

Garland is one of the worst themes to start with for customizing. It's tuned for reasonable customizing via the UI, but the tricky stuff gets stuffed into the code level - which gets in the way when you want to read the code.

Zen (although better for the Drupal-heads who know what they want) is not much better for folk coming from static-HTML to get their head around. It's a complex power-user theme. Very good when you know what you want, but not a learning tool when you just want a result. It's clever, but it does throw you in the deep end.

Others may have their own recommendations, but I learnt from Wireframe (DRUPAL-4 sorry) and Foundation. Cleanslate is also lightweight.
I guess that one of the older, clunky-looking core themes may also be a better start.
Only after seeing what they do (and don't do) will you grok what Garland does and why Zen is cool.

I must also mention Gutenberg which is a total Wordpress port! Limited by Wordpresses limitations and expectations on what a blog is, but adds several hundred more skins to the Drupal Repertoire.

.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/

well thanks everyone for the encouragement - i'm glad to see i'm not alone here. i'll download the zen theme and see if I can start making sense of it. maybe check out some of the other suggestions as well.

dag

Just start simple. Don't use Garland, it is way to complex for an introductory theme to modify. Zen is in many ways too if you want to understand Drupal theming.

Check this tutorial out for Drupal 5.
http://www.blkmtn.org/Quick-and-dirty-OSWD-theme-to-Drupal
This will get you started with the basic design and how things work which you will find much simpler then WordPress in some ways and challenging in different ways.

Then view this video for the rest of it.
http://drupaldojo.com/lesson/theming-like-a-pro

Then start looking at the various approaches that contrib themes use.

Don't jump to Drupal 6 yet. The documentation/tutorials aren't there yet. The community knowledge isn't there yet. It's not released yet. Now, will there be changes in Drupal 6? Yes. However, most of the knowledge you gain with Drupal 5 will still be useful and relevant.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}