Creating Templates: EE vs. Drupal vs. Joomla

Depends what you're trying to do. I can take an OSWD theme and turn it into a functional Drupal theme in 10-20 minutes. But if you want to get detailed and really customize it as most sites will then it will take more work. My guess, without having used EE, is that's equivalent to editing page.tpl.php, which is the equivalent of "XXX.html".

Michelle

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Is http://expressionengine.com/templates/themes/category/site_themes/ representative of how EE templates are created? I downloaded some from this page, and it looks like the full theme's code (templating code, HTML, CSS, etc) is inside a single .php file.

It looks like EE has a templating "filter" that converts simpler { } tags written in the template into their actual PHP counterparts behind the scenes. However writing these as very very basic PHP is only the slightest bit harder (or easier depending who you ask... I think the PHP is easier and I can't code PHP at all), and the regular PHP will perform better/faster.

Here's one EE example I found:

<div class="sidecategories"></div>
{exp:weblog:categories weblog="{my_weblog}" style="nested"}
<a href="{path={my_template_group}/index}">{category_name}</a>
{/exp:weblog:categories}

Drupal would do this with what is called a Region. You define the regions you want to use for the theme in a .info file, and they become available to the admin/build/blocks page. At that point you can drag and drop the Blocks into whichever region you want, in whichever order you want.

For right/left sidebars these are already included by default, but just for the sake of example, in yourthemename.info you could add a line line this: regions[my_region] = This is my region

And in your page.tpl.php, all you have to add is:

<div class="sidebar">
  <?php print $my_region; ?>
</div>

Spending a few minutes inside of the EE templates, code/template system differences aside, I found Drupal "far" easier in terms of quickly finding the part of the theme I wanted to work on at any given moment, compared to everything being in a single file in EE. In Drupal I'd think, "I want to edit how comments look" so I would open comment.tpl.php if I had to tweak the default HTML, or edit style.css otherwise. I keep all of my Drupal theme's files open in tabs at the same time, so I can rapidly edit any one I need to. In the EE template I'd be scrolling around, or searching in order to get to the part of the template I need to work with.

You might like to have a look at some of Drupal's contributed Framework / Base themes, to get a "cleaner" look at a Drupal theme (versus other heavily designed themes):
http://drupal.org/node/313510#framework-themes
(or search for .tpl.php files in the main modules directory in the root of your Drupal install, which contains the "core" versions of every template)

-- David
davidnewkerk.com | absolutecross.com
View my Drupal lessons & guides

No one editing code of any significance wants to do so in the browser, which lacks every conceivable tool and benefit of a proper code editor. So it's not "LOL Drupal doesn't do that"... for most people it's a good thing Drupal doesn't do that. There's an old add-on module theme editor which adds this, which if you're interested you could see about upgrading. Also if you are developing a website on a CMS, most people making a site of any more significance/size than a personal blog use a local server environment during initial development, such as WAMP or MAMP (therefore there is no uploading files, you just work on them and save, and the changes appear on the site).

-- David
davidnewkerk.com | absolutecross.com
View my Drupal lessons & guides

I'd prefer not to edit files via the browser, hell I don't even like editing files remotely. Sounds like accident waiting to happen :) But then again I am working on two community sites where an accidental break on the production site could be hugely traumatic.