I am just starting to experiment with Drupal, hoping to be able to piece together a school website before Sept (I'll have about 300 hours to invest). Apart from trying to set-up Drupal for our needs without any current knowledge of Drupal (and very limited html, css, js and php), I also need to create the theme (actually, it will be a multisite with 5 subdomains, each with its own colour-schemed sub-theme). I've only got basic photoshop knowledge too, and will have to create all the graphics and logos aswell.
I've downloaded Zen, but, although I applaude the developers, I can see from just messing around with it for the last ten hours, that I could actually blow 300 hours very easily just trying to create a basic theme - it's extremely, extremely complex compared to my previous cms (with which, 48 hours after downloading it, I had ported a static theme exactly, and had started learning the cms itself).
So my questions is: if I just choose any pre-made theme I like and spend my 300 hours trying to develop the initial content and features of the website instead, to get something useable and presentable in Sept, could I switch the theme back to zen later on? What restrictions or problems might I encounter later, having started with another theme?
Thanks for any advice.
Comments
If you don't rely on any
If you don't rely on any theme-specific things such as not common regions layout, themes settings module, etc.
then the transition from a theme to another will be very smooth.
Thanks for your reply.
Thanks for your reply.
> such as not-common regions layout
I don't understand how regions may vary from theme to theme?
- their reference names?
- the number of regions?
So, say I chose a theme with NO regions similar to Zen - when I switched to Zen later, wouldn't I just go into admin=>blocks and place the blocks into the regions that Zen DOES have?
> themes settings module
I don't understand what that is. Do many themes have a 'settings module'?
At the moment I don't know which parts of the Drupal Administration features/settings are theme dependant, and which aren't. The themeing is so complicated, it's not clear where the theme ends and Drupal begins. I'd like some further insight into which themes I should avoid. For instance, would moving from a Roople theme or Garland to a Zen-based one be difficult? If so, why?
Thanks for any further assistance.
BUMP Cheers.
BUMP
Cheers.
Themes are separate from admin features
Hi -Anti-,
Drupal is a very concrete and rather graceful example of the holy separation of content, functionality and styling. This means that a theme simply affects the way data (produced by drupal modules), how and where it is displayed. Of course themes can also control hiding some elements.
- their reference names?
- the number of regions?
Themes can differ in both ways. Basically what you write about replacing blocks into theme-specific is correct, but in most theme switching scenarios you probably don't even have to do that much. Zen has lots of regions and good control over them, I wouldn't worry about regions in your case at all.
Admin features don't depend on the theme in any way, afaik.
Themes have their own settings page under admin/build/themes/settings/*themenamehere*, and yes, this is theme-dependent... but these are just basic settings controlled by a short list of checkboxes.
I'd also like to say that the actual part of coming up with a functional and visually appealing web layout can be more challenging than implementing it with Zen. Zen is in my opinion a fantastic piece of work and gives you so much more power than other themes. One strong point for Zen is that it seems to be future-proof, updating is planned well.
Still, if original looks are not your primary mission with the site, you can do perfectly fine with some other mature theme. I'd personally go for themes that are developed especially for Drupal and use the phptemplate theme engine.