By Roman S on

Hello,

What it the general approach to styling a site? It seems there are many options present:
- Use the Contemplate module
- Use the Panels 2 module
- Roll your own template (*.tpl.php)
- Anything else?

Are these usually used by themselves or do they play nice together? When would I use one but not the other? Any D5 vs D6 considerations? Is the Panels/Contemplate relationship to custom templates similar to the CCK relationship to custom modules (i.e. takes care of most basic needs)?

I am a developer, with a decent amount of web app experience. Quite new to Drupal and PHP, but not afraid to get my hands dirty. Not a CSS guru by any means, but know enough to be dangerous. It seems to me that writing a template from scratch provides the most flexibility (this is important to me), but I would like to take advantage of whatever benefits those modules might provide. What do you think makes sense for me?

Thank you!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

mike.hobo’s picture

mike.hobo commented

Seems like you got a lot of aspirations, for my site, I used contemplate with CCK, along with all the templates via *.tpl.php

If you want to see what I have achieved you can go here http://www.pdxfm.com and browse around.

I don't use Panels, and I'm still not sure what it's use is.

Roman S’s picture

Roman S commented

Thanks Mike, I'll check it out.

Anybody else that has experience with all of these techniques?

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

I like to start with a basic "starter" (little styling) theme with the requisite default templates-- i've used zen in the past, but I'm doing a site now with framework and like it so far. You can start with any theme that is close to what you want (though I would avoid garland for this).

Once I get the basic appearance done, I like to use both contemplate and panels-- they give endless flexibility through the UI. You can do what contemplate does simply by creating/editing *.tpl.php files, but I find it incredibly easy to just pop into the template at the content type page. In much the same way, panels enables great flexibility to the page layout through the ui, though much of it can be done with regions and various tpl.php files as well.

in the end, it's probably a personal preference thing, but i find cck/views/contemplate/panels to be indispensable.

===
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Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
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Roman S’s picture

Roman S commented

That's interesting. Sounds like I should check them all out before making any sort of a decision.