I've been working with a small town newspaper for the last few months redesigning their website. Initially we had myself (a graphic designer) and a coder that was going to create a bare-bones CMS for us from scratch. Well, long story short, the coder and a subsequent coder moved on to bigger and better things.
I said I'd look into finding a CMS to use for their site and I heard about Drupal. From all I've read on the site here, it seems like the perfect thing...
I had already started a basic HTML page to work from as a template before I found Drupal. So my question is essentially this: can I get some advice on turning this - http://www.aha-workshop.com/arkcity/index.html into a theme?
Will it be extremely difficult? I know HTML and CSS very well. Essentially, only the first page would have the two columns of content and the ad column. Everything else would be a single content column and the ad column. How do I specify blocks for this? How do I group catagories such as "News" and "Sports" and only show the most recent two stories for each? How do I make it so that clicking "The Latest News" takes you to a running list of all news stories?
Any thoughts on how to kick start this transition would be great.
Comments
For rolling your own theme
For rolling your own theme from scratch, I've heard good things about using the Zen theme as a starting point. They've done all the layout legwork for you already; all you have to do is add styles.
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Eric3
You will need to learn
You will need to learn taxonomy for categorization and views for displaying lists. Views is an addon. Taxonomy is a core module. When using blocks, you can tell the system on which pages to display a block. If you want certain things on the front page, you will need to tell it to only show on ""