By Sam308 on

Drupal Theme Generator version 3.0
©2005 by Sam Raheb
January 5, 2005
Designed for use with Drupal versions 4.6.1 or greater
Supports both PHPtemplate and Xtemplate Themes
Includes Source Code

Drupal Theme Generator including (with Source Code)
The source code is include in the hopes that someone in the Drupal Community may be interested in building upon the Drupal Theme Generator and re-releasing it to the Drupal Community.

Features
• Completely Revised - with many more features !
• Generate an unlimited amount of site themes for Drupal CMS type websites
• Easily create both PHPtemplate and Xtemplate Themes in minutes
• Supports both flat (non-graphical) and graphic enhanced themes
• Includes 3 modes - Developer, View-All, and User Modes
• Preview your themes on you local computer without having to upload the themes to your Drupal site
• Includes optional Dynamic Drop-down menus support
• Include optional META tags support
• Includes support for adding your own custom programming code.
• Integrate additional CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and HTML code in to the themes via an external file or hard coded format
• Includes both regional and block border-image and background-image features
• Includes a Random color theme generator
• Include a HTML Color assistant
• Change both vertical and horizontal alignment of theme elements
• Includes 9 graphically enhanced 3D website themes
• Includes a theme development test area
• Easy to use spreadsheet interface

System Requirements
Microsoft Excel 2000, 2002, or 2003 with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support
Any Internet web browser

Where to get the Program
http://xlecom.com/?q=node/117

Included Sample Themes (all revised):
• 3daframe
• 3dblue
• 3dbluewt
• 3dolive
• 3dolivewt
• 3dpeach
• 3dpeachwt
• bluemarine2
• test

Development Platform
This program was developed under Windows XP Professional SP2. It was written in Excel 2000, tested in Excel 2000 & 2003, and in Windows Internet Explorer 6.0 and Firefox 1.0.7.

How the Program Basically Works
This program was developed using both the Bluemarine PHPtemplate and Xtemplate themes as the master templates. Therefore, your new themes are based on these models. The design parameters you change basically modify the code in these templates to create new themes.

Drupal Theme Generator Source Code
Most programs typically output results that are static. In the case of the Drupal Theme Generator program, the program outputs actual programming code to be used by other computers. Thus can be said the output is static but is used in a dynamic environment.

The program primarily functions by taking user input and running it through a series of IF-THEN formulas placed in strategic “line code” locations on multiple spreadsheets. The calculated result is a custom set of HTML, php, and CSS code blocks, which are then outputted as individual theme files to your local computer. These theme files are then uploaded to a web server and interpreted by the site’s’ theme engine to render the final theme to your web browser.

If you are familiar with writing formulas in Microsoft Excel, then this endeavor may be right for you. Keep in mind that all work performed on this program must be open source and publicly available.

Why Develop this Program?
I have been using Drupal since May 2005 and noticed that there is a short supply of themes available for users. Also, since this time there are very few new themes introduced. It takes quite a bit of time to develop a single new theme, therefore I can understand why. For these reasons, I decided to write a program in Microsoft Excel that generates both the PHPtemplate and Xtemplate Themes based on user design inputs.

Mote information is available at the xlecom.com website.

I hope you enjoy this Drupal Theme Design utility. If you do, I would like to know.

Thanks,

Sam Raheb (sam308)
Drupal Theme Generator Developer
http://xlecom.com

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.6.x

Comments

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

it has been a nice piece of software-solution since it started ... will Ver 4 head for Drupal 4.7 or are there any hints You could share for one to easily make ThemeGenerator-themes work with 4.7?

Thanks, T

Sam308’s picture

Sam308 commented

T:

It is my understanding that the Drupal 4.6.x themes will also work in Drupal 4.7.

Since there is so much code to manage in the Drupal Theme Generator program, I want to wait until Drupal 4,7 is finally released as the official version, not beta, before I make another major revision. I will need new “final” master templates in order to make the changes.

Since the source code is available in the program, are the any volunteers who want to start making new themes for Drupal 4.7?

Sam Raheb (sam308)

Sam308’s picture

Sam308 commented

A new revised version of the Drupal Theme Generator is available.

Drupal Theme Generator Version 3.1
Released: January 20, 2006
Includes Source Code

Version 3.1 Revisions Changes

  • Made the Top Navigation Dynamic HTML drop-down menu’s Main menu titles linkable.
  • Added a total of (3) more user variables to the program that affects both the Theme Design and Top Navigation Dynamic Menus.

    •     * General text line height (Theme Design - item 47)
        * Drop-down border color (Top Navigation Dynamic Menus - item 57)
        * Main Menu font size (Top Navigation Dynamic Menus - item 64)

  • Some programming code optimization

    • More Information is available at: Drupal CMS Theme Generator

    Take care,

    Sam Raheb (sam308)
    Drupal Theme Generator Developer

    andre75’s picture

    andre75 commented

    I am wondering if it works with this patch:
    http://drupal.org/node/13148
    I recently applied this patch to fix the Base HREF problem, just to find out, that my theme got totally messed up by it. So I rolled everything back.
    I tought that I had to spend time on my theme again (grrr), when I found this post.
    Looks like I may have found an easy way out ;-).
    So here is my question:
    The patch above is also applied towards phptemplate.engine and the page.tpl.php files. Can I use your generator to generate a theme that actually will work with the Base HREF patch applied?
    Since this patch will probably be used by many, would it be an option to have the a version of the Theme Generator that works WITH this patch?

    Thanks for your answer. Either way I will try it out.

    Andre

    Sam308’s picture

    Sam308 commented

    Andre:

    The source code is available in the program (developer mode), so you can make any changes you want.

    Regarding the path / patch issue... This is an issue independent of the Theme generator program.

    I have not had any path or 404 error problems and do perfer relative paths for my websites. Using absolute paths can cause problems if you ever intend to move or make another copy of your website.

    I suggest you experiment with the program and see if it works for you. I have used it to create many themes for some of my Drupal based websites and had no problems.

    Sam Raheb (Sam308)

    andre75’s picture

    andre75 commented

    I never had problems either until I started looking at the raw logfiles. I saw a whole bunch of requests like
    mysite.com/path1/path2/path1/path2/path1/path2....
    I think EVERYONE will has this problem, wether they noticed it or not as this is directly related to the way some of these spiders work and Drupal is built.
    Nevertheless I will not fix this issue until I have plenty of time, as it seems to require changes on the theme php files (and my php knowledge is close to nil).
    Since it looks like this patch has been commited to 4.7, this change to the themes seems to be unavoidable for future use.
    It could be related to the Spreadfirefox theme I have adapted. Since there were other problems with this Theme I will give your generator a try and see if it works witht the patch.
    If I understand the patch correctly, you can still move your site by a simple change to settings.php. Your url is not coded anywhere else.
    Just my 2ct.

    Thanks for sharing your generator with us!!!!!!

    Andre

    Sam308’s picture

    Sam308 commented

    Andre:

    First of all, I have experienced the same “page not found” problem for over many years. I do not concern myself anymore about this issue because of the following:

    We all agree that there are an increasing number of automated bots crawling the web. Not all of them can interpret and write out the proper url(s) to your site. These particular bots either interpret the path to your site incorrectly, or end up guessing on a path location. Bad urls result, and end up redistributed over the web many times, thus affecting (screwing up) your visitor / hits statistics.

    The “legitimate urls”, are the ones you are really concerned about. These “legitimate urls”, are links that either you initiated, or were crawled by legitimate search engines. Legitimate search engines typically verify the “existence” of a page or url during a crawl before recording them. In other words, a page must have existed in order to index or cache it.

    Concern your self with the “legitimate urls” and not the “relative path” or “page not found” issue. All my websites, over 10 of them, and not related to each other, have no problems with a lack of business or visitors. And guess what… they are all setup using “relative paths”.

    Remember, A “Human" browser can usually find a way to your site via a “legitimate url”.

    Re-think on how you read your stats, and be concerned only with the ones that really matter.

    Sam Raheb (Sam308)

    andre75’s picture

    andre75 commented

    Hi Sam,

    in general I totally agree with you and it really isn't any problem with your theme generator. I checked it out and I have to say it is wonderful. It takes all the guesswork out for me (I have no css knowledge so all my themes were built by trial and error).

    Now that that is said, I firmly believe in making my website as compatible as possible. If spider Google Desktop search has problems getting my RSS feeds right, I know that I will miss out on visitors who do not see that my site got updated.
    I also take it seriously, if visitors using Safari have problems, even though my logs show that they are less than 5%.
    If my log files are cluttered with these requests, since Google Desktop is trying to get the url and then subsequently trying again and again and again, it is easier to miss the real data and my Apache gets loaded for no reason.
    Anyways, I will build my own themes and I will defenitely use your tool for some parts of it.

    Andre

    sepeck’s picture

    sepeck commented

    Those are the result of broken search engine crawlers who don't understand base_url or for a while google desktop search was reported to do this as well.

    -sp
    ---------
    Test site, always start with a test site.
    Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

    -Steven Peck
    ---------
    Test site, always start with a test site.
    Drupal Best Practices Guide