By arthurhanlon on

Hey guys,

My first post here so be gentle.

I'm a long time user of Joomla and am currently using it on many of the production sites I run but would really like to get a firm grounding of how Drupal works. From my initial research, whilst Joomla and Drupal are essentially CMS systems, I get the feeling that Drupal provides a firmer and more complex base to develop more feature intense websites. Joomla seems more aimed at the layman whilst Drupal seems more targetted to those who want maximum control over every aspect of the website.

My trouble is that, now I have a firm understanding of how Drupal works as a CMS, I want to start getting into templating and can't help but think Joomla spoon feeds with regards to this. This isn't such a bad thing but I get the idea that Drupal's templating is way more complex than that of Joomla's and I seem to be having a little difficulty understanding how it all works.

Other than this: http://drupal.org/theme-guide. Is there anything more explanatory for a beginner that may help me to truly understand the Drupal templating system? Perhaps some of you know of resources with examples or tutorials that are worthy of mentioning?

Thanks in advance guys,
Arthur

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

aufumy’s picture

aufumy commented

Mark from Raincitystudios posted a blog post on theming
http://raincitystudios.com/blogs-and-pods/mark-yuasa/drupalcamp-vancouve...
also RCS uses basic theme http://drupal.org/project/basic

Also look for screencasts/videos about any drupal topics, this is from Seattle drupalcamp about theming:
http://seattle.drupal-camp.org/themer-meet-developer

gforce301’s picture

gforce301 commented

Welcome aboard Arthur,

Hopefully some of the more knowledgeable D6 theme people will come and give you some advice. I am unfortunately still in the pre D6 theming world but I am starting catch up. The reason I posted here, besides to welcome you, is to tell you how I got started theming in Drupal. Mainly that was just by doing it. I believe I completely white screen of deathed at least 3 installs while learning :).

Read the theme guide closely and try a few things out. Take a core theme that comes with drupal and customize it. I actually broke several on purpose once just to see how. Understanding the pieces you will be working with will help. Like what blocks are and what nodes are and what the difference is between the two. On the subject of templating, if you use the core provided phptemplate engine, basically you can make a template for virtually anything. You can make a template for all nodes in general, one for nodes of just a certain content type, and one for just a certain node just as an example.

Good luck and don't be afraid to ask.

aryanto’s picture

aryanto commented

I have tried a lot of CMS' including Joomla. For me, Joomla's templating is more complex. I am quite new to Drupal as well. But I found Drupal's templating is very straight forward.

In short, we just need to create a standard HTML page (header, body, footer, etc) and name the file as page.tpl.php. If we want to pull the variables from Drupal, we just need to use them in between <?php and ?>. In case you don't know yet, you can find the list of variables that can be pulled out in http://drupal.org/node/11812.

arthurhanlon’s picture

arthurhanlon commented

Thanks for the warm welcome guys.

Think I'm just gonna dive right in and break some stuff to see what happens. Heck! That's what I did with Joomla.

No doubt you guys will see more of me on here asking "What's this for?" and "How do I do ...."

Thanks again,
Arthur