By Eli. on

Hey Guys,
I'm just getting started with Drupal,
and I'm having a hard time settling in with the drupal themes.

I've installed the Devel plugin, but I'm not quite sure on how to use the info it gives away.

I'm very familiar with Smarty theming engine,
and I'm not a newbie regarding PHP programming,
but I've found the theming guide here on drupal.org to be a little shy with examples.

Anyhow, I have my own HTML structure, I've created a new theme based on the garland theme,
And used the page.tpl.php to just dump my HTML structure there.

I've created a new menu called "menu top", but I have no idea on how to edit the output.
I've tried the theme_menu_item function, but I didn't quite understood what it does exactly,
or even where should I use it...

Is there a basic guide for themeing?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Jeff Burnz’s picture

Jeff Burnz commented

The Drupal 5 theme guide is pretty good and much of applies to Drupal 6.

First thing I would advise is to not use Garland if you really want to build a highly customised theme. Simple reason is that its already a highly customised theme. You are better off with a blank canvas sort of theme like Zen, Framework or even the Blueprint theme. Unless you want the colourable features of Garland (there are other colourable themes also).

You can use Smarty in Drupal - http://drupal.org/project/smarty, but frankly, for many reasons (sheer amount of docs and forum help being two good ones) I'd punt for the default phptemplate engine.

My last point is really focused on asking for help - try to be specific and goal orientated. When you say "I have no idea on how to edit the output", it doesn't really tell us a whole lot about what you want to achieve, and there are many many things you could be trying to achieve, and just as many ways to achieve them.

Mentioning theme_menu_item gives me some clues, but in the end I would be guessing if I tried to answer your question. In any case, its highly unlikely you'll find examples and help docs regarding theme_menu_item in any newbie docs, but rather in the Drupal API documentation and probably some examples here in the forums and perhaps in the more advanced book pages.

There are some very good tutorials out there in the wild, search for them on Google, for example I believe this site has some great tutorials - http://drupaldojo.net/

Pimp your Drupal 8 Toolbar - make it badass.
Adaptivetheme - theming system for people who don't code.