Learning theamin by editing existing theme, which would it be?

a_h - May 9, 2008 - 10:24

Hello,

I'm trying to wrap my head around Drupal and learn how to build themes.

I read somewhere something like: don't try to build a theme from a scratch, but first try editing some existing theme. The theming guide says "Directly modifying Garland or Minnelli is strongly discouraged since they are used for the install and upgrade process."

So, what would be a perfect theme for a beginner to start editing? Any other small tips how to ease the process?

All help is appreciated! Thanks.

Try to look at

Iumentum - May 9, 2008 - 10:51

Try to look at Zen.
http://drupal.org/project/zen
Its good for greating your own themes on, but think its also good for getting into some of the basic theme things.

Thank you for these! The Zen

a_h - May 9, 2008 - 11:46

Thank you for these!

The Zen is only compatible with Drupal 5. Feels stupid to learn the 5, basically it's useless knowledge in the future.

Or, what would you do? Instal version 5, or built the theme based on some theme that's updated to version 6?

Thank you!

1. There is a 6.x

gpk - May 9, 2008 - 12:41

1. There is a 6.x developmental version of Zen that may be good enough to start experimenting with.
2. You can always copy themes/garland to sites/all/themes/mygarland and experiment with the copy.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

I did the step two, should I

a_h - May 9, 2008 - 19:12

I did the step two, should I now see "mygarland" in theme list? I can see it.

The documentation http://drupal.org/node/171194 seems to give the same instructions as you and reffers to multi-site installation documentation http://drupal.org/node/43816. But I cant really figure out what should I do?

Thanks for replying, it's been very helpfull!

Don't worry about multi-site

gpk - May 9, 2008 - 19:56

Don't worry about multi-site stuff for now. sites/all/themes is just a good place to put custom themes. Enable mygarland and away you go ..

To get a more basic idea of how a theme works you actually need to look at the documentation for Drupal 5 (the Drupal 6 theme documentation really only goes into the cool new stuff). Basically, start with the page.tpl.php which is the basis for your whole site. It just consists of an XHTML page layout template with various PHP print statements at appropriate points - these inject the dynamic content into the static XHTML page structure.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

 
 

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.