Drupal is somewhat lacking in themes. It does have some good ones, but I'd have to say one of the main deterents for a lot of beginners (and even advanced CMS users) for Drupal is its lack of quality themes.
I ran across this site while surfing the web which hosts dozens of WordPress themes. The thing is, every single one of these themes was made during WordPress's their "Theming Contest". Over 140 themes were submitted. Look through them yourself, and you will see that there are many great themes in there.
The thing is, Drupal is not a difficult system to theme (I personally love it), but not all of us are designers by nature. I think Drupal could greatly benefit from such a competition, and many Drupal-appropriate themes would be made (what I mean by this is not just blog themes, but themes for the CMS aspect of Drupal as well).
How many would be interested in something like this? I truly feel that Drupal needs it. If Drupal.org does not want to get official involved, I have several sites I could use to run said competition, and there may be others willing to help.
Comments
I Think it's a great idea.....
I agree with some of your statements.... I think a lot more can be done with theming some of the content types as well. I personally would really appreciate a contest like this
I love the idea
I really do.
The only quandary I had between using Drupal or Wordpress was because of the themes. Drupal's functionality and PHPTemplate effectiveness tipped the scale, and I settled for my own design, even though I am not a web designer. :)
I might even try and submit my own layout. :)
One is on the way
Since it is almost certain that we will be receiving some money from Google due to our involvement with the Summer of Code project, we have decided to hold a theme contest. More details later :-)
- Robert Douglass
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www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
I might be intrested but
I'm running into a few problems creating themes. Certain things aren't exactly explained and so far people haven't said much to some my questions.(not sure if maybe they don't know the answers either)
Some modules contain html vs css. I haven't figured out how to theme those modules because their theme is static because of the html. Speaking of modules some(I only realized reciently) need to have their CSS changed to match themes.(same with any graphics they use) Recipe for example works fine with democratica but looks messed up in greybox and marvin. It does have a css which I'm playing with to make it match. I think that was mentioned in posts at one point but not in the doccumentation. Though I could be wrong.
I'm having problems figuring out how to globally set input boxes colours and drop downs for forms. Same with changing form buttons. I do know how to do it from looking at css examples online. But when I try to do what they say it has no effect. So I guess there is something I'm missing that isn't documented for us newbies. Such as I had to guess at how to move body content down so the background image would display right in all browsers. It turned out I just had to make a margin-top for the "table".
For things like the drop down menu's(js based) existing in current themes like persian it doesn't give any idea how to change things like background. This is causing me problems in finishing a persian varient. Being seethrough you can see the underlying text along with the menu making it hard to see.
In general for us newbies I think a few more things need to get doccumented. I did figure out I needed the common.css and drupal.css to do somethings however only reciently did I see mention(thanks Dub!) for how to make it pick that up. A few things I wrongly assumed it would look for in the /theme/themname directory and use that first and if it doesn't find it default to the the /misc/filename or /theme/parent theme.
I agree there isn't that much theme wise though there are a few more on the drupal theme site that aren't released for others to use. If I could fix the little things I'd put out 2 themes for others to use. I'm working on one theme from scratch and had to guess on how to do the theme file by looking at other ones.(phptemplate ones) It's untested as so far I'm trying to get the varients I've made of existing themes looking like it should throughout the site. I had problems figuring out how to do the layout in css for drupal. While I used to do my other sites in nano I'm hardly that savy on php.(one my old sites was featured in a electric sheep movie... I found this out oddly long after it was done)
Surely though there must be people who have used drupal longer that are up to a competition. I'm really suprised more people haven't released themes for others to use in drupal. If you do have a competition I don't suppose that is any garantee people would make them available either. Which still leaves newbies with a limited selection of themes to use.
Drupal theming, identity, re-use, rules
The reason there are so few public Drupal themes is not really because theming Drupal is hard or complicated... but rather that Drupal is complex.
Designing a generic theme that can hold the variety of possible Drupal sites out there is a huge endeavour. You have to theme every possible sidebar block, every possible page and supply a healthy set of standard styles for content too. And that doesn't deal with contributed modules either.
Compare this to a WordPress theme, which consists of simple templates. A list of blog entries and one for a single blog entry with comments (with minor variations for archives and search results). Every WordPress blog has the same kind of content, so themers can implement very specific blog-oriented ideas.
So it is no surprise that there are so few generic, free Drupal themes out there. On the other hand, there are plenty of Drupal sites out there with lovely custom themes. But because they are designed for a single site, they require much less work and don't have to be as complete.
Furthermore, you should not underestimate the fact that designing a generic theme is hard. Without a visual identity, site concept or target audience, a designer has to work in the dark and the resulting theme often lacks character.
So, given all that... what would the rules for such a theme contest be? Asking for fully versatile Drupal themes puts a strain on the themer and is bound to reduce the amount of entries substantially. On the other hand, we don't want to receive a bunch of nice looking templates that are worthless on anything but a simple text blog.
Coming up with unambiguous juding rules will be very hard as well.
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If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.
Maybe if the contest had cateogries
Commercial site, project site, personal site, blogger, and generic? Right now because I have so many modules installed I am altering the themes I'm making to account for that. Though obviously I don't use all modules so somethings will be missed. My site however is a personal site.
I suggest if a contest is made the resulting themes list which modules the author uses and has applied the theme to. Then that gives the person that might use it later the heads up as to what they might need to change if they add another module. Also perhaps a listing of colours/color scheme used to aide in quickly altering added modules when adjusting the style.css.
I completely agree with
I completely agree with Steven,
Our site's custom theme took FAR more work than any cms template I've done. It was only after I paid the drupal communities own Joshua Stevens for his help was I able to have a complete template.
After spending over 20 hours (not including the hours Joshua worked) on the theme, we decided not to add the theme to the themegarden because since there are so few themes, we could be pretty sure there would be quite a number of sites using our theme if we did.
The strange thing is, for having such a complicated theme system, drupal is surprisingly inflexible. Sure, there is some flexibly, but there are still hard coded pieces of HTML in the source and the same template file is use for the category and the node pages.
didn't see on theme garden
Did I understand you that you had submitted this to theme garden? I could not find it online. Is this available somewhere else?
One of the barriers for me
I can't speak for others, but one of the barriers for me is that I have not found the time to learn the ins and outs of CVS, which is required in order to submit a theme to the community. I have one theme intended for contribution mostly finished, and I believe I have an approved CVS account, but I've not yet had the time to research CVS clients, weigh the pros and cons (some, like BBedit, cost $200), install it, and then learn all the vagaries of CVS. It's simply a big mystery to me, and a learning project I've not had time for yet.
I would imagine that this would keep most of the designer-minded folks away from contributing. CVS may be familiar to programmers, but being able to contribute themes only via CVS means that you're limited to programmers who can design, and designers who've not only learned the CMS well enough to theme for it but also had the time and resources to learn what is essentially a programmer's protocol.
I'm sure there are all sorts of advantages to having the CVS requirement, such as having a trackable means for collaborative patching and fixing. But it's not something that most designers will have ever come across before. And that creates a barrier to entry. Not insurmountable, but not insignificant, either.
My own perspective.....
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Laura
pingV
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Open source alternatives?
I use gentoo linux most often and though I'm in win2k right now I remember seeing cvs things. I ran a google search of the package database and found some clients:
Java clients
http://www.jcvs.org/
http://gruntspud.sourceforge.net/
Tk based but offers download for windows/mac: http://www.twobarleycorns.net/tkcvs.html
I found some other tools but they were for unix only. Hopefully the above will help some non unix users that want to use cvs but only know of expensive clients for it.
I agree that cvs is a deterrent. I've avoided it in unix simply because I can't be bothered to figure it all out at the moment. I'm too busy with offline life. Also it seemed a bit intimidating but maybe that is because I was new to linux at the time and trying to figure out how to navigate it.(this was back I think when mandrake was at version 6)
Btw I'm neither a designer nor a programmer. I took programming back in the '80's(on apples) but alots changed. I'm one of those people self taught on ibm clones, modern mac's and unix. While I had formal art training privately when young it was in tradional art only. While I have contributed to gentoo ebuild system I'm probably farther out there than most of the people here in respects for understanding certain things. I don't know how many of us around here are hobbists that are neither CSE's or even IT techs. Consider too the non techie(or someone like me who has certain disabilities) might not get some lingo even if they RTFM.
Get help committing
I'm sure there are lots of people who would either help you get your theme committed or would committ it for you. Don't let that last barrier stump you! If you've done all that work you should get the recognition that comes with contributing it to the repository.
I use Eclipse to develop and to interface with CVS. It is nice because it supports all the programming languages I know so I never change tools when I change languages.
- Robert Douglass
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If this helped you, please take the time to rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net
Thank you
I do appreciate the offer. I won't let CVS stump me, but it is delaying when I can work on it. The point I was trying to make, though, was that CVS will stump most designers, who may know html/css enough to make their designs work but otherwise probably would know nothing of programmer's tools (nor want to learn). I'm not suggesting that the CVS requirement be dropped, either. I'm simply noting but one barrier that might prevent some great designs from being formally contributed. It sure seems like there are a lot of wonderful Drupal designs out there. It's not like they don't exist.
Anyway, I will get to my own contributions soon. Thanks again.
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Laura
pingV
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
Agreed
CVS is a major barrier to theme designers, who are usually not that tech savy.
That's why I put a bit of effort into writting a simple point and click tutorial on how to use CVS. Mainly aimed at OS X, the natural habitat of most themers.
http://drupal.org/node/20202
CVS is actually very simple to use, once you know how. It's just getting good instructions that is the barrier at the moment.
I still have to add a few more pages for other common CVS tasks, but almost done.
[MegaGrunt]
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Drupal Specialists: Consulting, Development & Training
Robert Castelo, CTO
Code Positive
London, United Kingdom
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Very nice!
Thanks for the pointer!
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Laura
pingV
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Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet
my 2 cents
Such a "contest" needs to have a defined scope and criteria for rating.
I immediately thought the same things as others.... needs to be split into categories. I have always loved http://coolhomepages.com/ and their sorting of sites.
Also consider pure CSS vs a html/css mix. (Personally I like to hard code a table to avoid the dozen hacks CSS needs to work in all browsers)
What is the ruling on core customization? Most of the themes I do are so custom, no one could just add them to their own site.. so What is the scope of this "contest"? Does the developer have to make it generic? Do they have to make it available to all after?
How would you judge? A user rating system of 1-5 over all or split it into areas like Usability, Design, Use of CSS, clean and simple, etc.
A Contenst might inspire people expidite their submission, but really, this should be an ongoing thing... just a place to post a screenshot, description, owner info/notes, vote option, and a link. This would be alot liek http://coolhomepages.com/ where people can keep adding on.
Who said they would host this? More details please.. Are you Drupal.org related or just a developer looking for traffic? I would like Drupal.org to have 1st Rights to such a contest.
David McIntosh
neofactor.com
And for beginners ...
What if there is a section in Theme Garden for the best/creative customizations of generic themes, it would help a lot beginners in their first steps.
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Working on a bilingual mini-portal - www.archeologic.net
I actually have an account
I actually have an account over at the theme garden. I was kind of disappointed there was no forum for new designers to help them get past issues they were having. I mean it's a site that has to do with themes for drupal. You'd think they'd have a spot to discuss it beyond just submission of a theme or just showing a finished theme. I think there are only 2 forums there. It would be good if it actually held the theming FAQ and had some helpful links aiming at css tutorial or noting which css elements are commonly used for certain things within drupal. Right now I've got both themes I'm doing doing most of what I want. But still one part(not all) of the persian menu is still transparent which is a problem and I can't figure out how to make a drop down box(the one IM uses) go black with grey text. I'm not sure what that is called in css to look to fix it or what the menu part is called to fix that. So an FAQ would be helpful or at least asking others with more theme experience that might have some clue.
Nope
Themes.drupal.org is for showing themes. If you want to discuss themes, then open up a discussion here on Drupal.org. The site is subject to being wiped for an upgrade when new versions of Drupal come out. Also, unlike drupal.org, there are only 2-3 people that help out on it.
There is a forum on theme development here on this site in these forums: http://drupal.org/forum/3 called Theme development.
If we start segmenting 'where' the theme discussion information is located, then it will make it even harder to find out and discuss what others have discovered.
You want to discuss something from theme's. start a discussion. :)
You want to start a theming FAQ? Put one together and add it to the handbook. Anyone can add a handbook page. The difficulty is, your page.tpl.php that you write may have completely different div's in it then mine, so a faq for your theme, may be completely irrelevant to mine.
As to your Persian theme question, start a new thread in the theme development section with your question. I don't use the theme myself and find it unattractive :).
-sp
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Test site...always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Well I was trying to change that
I don't like the other themes based off persian. The main one is ok but I was changing the colours of it and graphics. I do really like marvin which is why I'm making a low contrast black version of it. Only two things I need to fix for that one(drop down colour for IM and recipe summery isn't aligning right no matter what I do). I have posted in the forum but it seems less active than other forum spots.
Understood about the themes.drupal.org. Though maybe a screenshot spot somewhere might be neat. Then though the whole demo doesn't load people can get an idea of what can be done theming drupal.
With an FAQ I do understand. I'm more interested in a css section having an addition of what things can be used/done. Particularly for modules. I'll probably throw together what I've learned somewhere later. Once I'm finally finished 2 themes so have a better understanding of things.
great idea...
Hi,
I had a look at the wordpress theme competition submissions and the majority were very un-inspiring.
A few were great and were very well thought out, but, having said that, I got the sense that the themes were very "flat", for lack of a better word. i.e. they would only look good on the first page, once you click down a level from the front, it loses any sense of design or ergonomics.
I would classify that wordpress style competition as a FRONT-PAGE-SKIN competition rather than a THEME competition.
My point being that drupal has a lot more depth and functionality than wordpress, IMHO and a SITE THEME should reflect that.
i.e. what might be more interesting would be a THEME competition that stipulates innovative style and layout of the core drupal elements...
i.e. Structure the drupal theme competition so it includes multiple "skins" for each core element or a few of the out-of-the-box drupal features, such as:
Proposed rule: your theme competition submission must include layouts for a minimum of 3 of the following out-of-the-box Drupal features.
Leaving an optional addition of contributed or popular add-on drupal features such as:
Etc.
The proposed structure above would encourage a more innovative and valuable result, I think. It's more complicated, but, when you keep things simple, each "skin" is only a slight variation from the front page skin.
I was partly inspired to use drupal when I saw the superb terminus site and the way they put a bit of time and effort into creating a theme that treats different elements of drupal differently, while maintaining an overall look and feel that is intuitive with the wow factor.
The wordpress "front page skin" competition is useful...but to be honest an awful lot of them were the same, with just a modified header jpeg or a different colour pallete.
I think THEMES should be more than just a "front page skin"...and the beauty of drupal is that it allows you to not only create highly functional sites, but, apply bespoke layouts for different elements creating a site that is both ergonomic and beautiful to look at.
Admittedly, it will mean more time for people to submit their ideas and hence probably less submissions than a wordpress "front page skin" type competition...but I think it would be more exciting and more valuable to think deeper than just the front page.
By structuring the competition in this way gets people to think a bit more about not just the "front page skin" but how the comments, blogs, stories etc. are presented and layed out.
Would be a great advertisement for Drupal as well..
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
I completely agree.
I completely agree.
Word-Press looked mostly the same with a few here and there unique. Most Drupal Sites I see to-date I can immediately tell it is Drupal... they are small expansions of the initial themes.
I would love to see more sights like http://bryght.com/
David McIntosh
neofactor.com
I like the bryght site..
the bryght site is good..they have given some thought to how stuff is presented beyond the main page..but I still think the terminus site takes some beating.
I think a drupal theme comp should focus on this area rather than do a wordpress styled "front page skin" competition.
It may also help to increase the non-programmer friendliness of theming.
I was trying to theme something with flexinode.module recently and it took me 2 days of searching just to find a simple tip to allow me to do what I wanted.
That's not a criticism on flexinode.module or drupal - more to do with how thick I am. The development and modules are truly superb. Far superior to other Commmunity Management & development Tools I have come across, but for a non programmer, it's actually a struggle to do something more than tweak the initial themes.
despite managing to pull together the snippets page in the handbook..my eyes tend to glaze over and I get a headache when I'm looking at template overrides or some of the more complex coding stuff....and trying to work out how to use it.
That missing link between the superb drupal development & functionality and non-programmer designers is probably a reason so many drupal sites end up looking the same...i.e. people tend to tweak the initial theme slightly and live with it, rather than getting their hands a little dirty surfing the support forum or handbook to work out how to theme stuff better.
Hope that makes sense and isn't taken as an overly negative comment...I'm constantly blown away with drupal...what I'm trying to do at the moment is put a little more effort into "how can I make this look/work better?"
Dub
Currently in Switzerland working as an Application Developer with UBS Investment Bank...using Drupal 7 and lots of swiss chocolate
Purpose categorisation
I think different categories should cover the end use (actual purpose) of the site as well. Each type of site has specific theming needs, and not all designs can cover for all Drupal functions, as in that case it comes down to a skin contest. :)
For example, my website. The design is specific for a small site with a weblog, "product" presentation and a few interactive items. Not good for a community oriented website, though.
bump
What a great idea! Have a prize. Have a couple of feature articles by experienced themers.