I just went to a Web page because of a referrer link from Drupal Talk. When I got there, I instantly recognized the Kubrick theme and thought, "Ah, another Drupal site." Then I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and saw this text: "Careers is proudly powered by WordPress". Curses! Foiled again! Then I thought, "All right, Drupal is getting way too heavy in the theme knock-off area."
We need more distinctive and original themes that will tag sites as Drupal sites by their look and feel. I realize there are lots of folks who create their own custom themes, and that's fine, and then they never share them, and that's fine, too. I think, however, for those that do share, let's stop mimicking other themes and start creating our own unique Drupal themes, and set our sites apart from the crowd.
/me steps off the soap box.
Comments
Problem: CVS access
I think the problem is CVS access. Right now, to contribute a theme upstream one has to have a CVS account. These are not easy to come by any more.
We need a better theme upload system.
Fully agree
This is one of the biggest drawback of Drupal and could make drupal eventually lose the mass.
I agree 100% with everything
I agree 100% with everything said so far.
I plan on releasing some very unique themes in the near future - if I can't get a CVS account to upload them, I will find another way (another site) to host them on for download.
My personal site doesn't have the bandwidth limit for allowing perminant downloads like that :/
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Josh Stevens
Electric Transcendentalism
myth
It is a myth that cvs accounts are hard to get. Make a theme and then request one with a link to the theme you are ready to contribute. This indicates that you are serious contributor.
THere are over 300 people with CVS accounts that can contribute. That is a fairly large number of people for an Open Source project.
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
I'm not sure that's so true.
I'm not sure that's so true. I waited over a month for my CVS account last summer...
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Personal home page | Rhombic Networks: Drupal-friendly web hosting
You mean last summer when
You mean last summer when the server went down and then the following months when most resources were dedicated to building the new environment?
In the past, drupal smtp logs have demonstrated that cvs account requests went out. Often the recipients later indicated that the approvals were in their own spam filters. All CVS accounts recieve either accept or reject with reason. Generally this was a monthly task that was done by a very few people. I think approvals are twice a month now.
You can either re-apply or ask on the infrastrucutre list. I suggest you re-apply.
-Steven Peck
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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
Feel free to help out. If
Feel free to help out. If you haven't seen two new ones for 4.7 check them out.
fancy
meta
I am considering porting some http://www.oswd.org/ themes
-Steven Peck
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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
Yes, I saw Fancy & Meta
Yes, I saw Fancy & Meta, and they are quite nice. I am planning on creating and submitting at least one theme myself. It is currently in the development process, but I have been rather busy the last 2 or 3 weeks doing non-Drupal related stuff. :^(
Themes
Drupal blows away the competition with functionality, but it is in serious need of some good theming. I would guess there are more programmers involved with the project than there are graphic designers - and the two are very different personalities with very different strengths.
The last few brochure sites I did, I wound up using Joomla because I can crank out a beautiful looking site in an hour. I'm using Drupal for a community site which needs it's power and flexibility, and in the long run that's the site I care about - I just wish there were more options to make it look as good as it works.
I wouldn't even care if I had to pay for themes - I've purchased several commercial Joomla templates because they were exactly what I wanted and they were gorgeous.
See also
Recently there has been an effort to coordinate some conversions of OSWD themes by Der. The thread can be found at http://drupal.org/node/50428 (last status update at http://drupal.org/node/50428#comment-103173).
--
Tips for posting to the forums.
When your problem is solved, please post a follow-up to the thread you started.
Not sure
I don't think so. Check out all the Joomla, Nuke, E-107 sites and tell me that 99% of them don't look alike.
I think theming in Drupal is quite hard, but the looks you can achieve once you got to mess with phpTemplate are quite unique.
That doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see a few more themes as a good base to start ones own.
To me, a good theme has to be:
- clean and simple (no flash, no annoying moving things, easily readable)
- fast to load even on slow modems
- easily configurable
- working in all browsers (this is where my two sites lack)
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Sites
>>To me, a good theme has to be:
>>- clean and simple (no flash, no annoying moving things, easily readable)
>>- fast to load even on slow modems
>>- easily configurable
>>- working in all browsers (this is where my two sites lack)
Those are my requirements also.
Many Joomla/et al sites look similar because people seem to use the same templates - but I have 3 sites which don't in any way look like they are running the same CMS. My recipe site ( http://www.JustTheRecipe.com ) is simple but attractive, and it took me less than an hour (plus about 30 minutes of Photoshop work for the dissolving food photos at the top) and it was the first time I had ever touched Joomla in my life. Drupal sets up fairly quickly too, but there is no way you are going to get the graphic appeal with ANY of the existing themes in a short amount of time.
Please don't take this as a jab at Drupal, because as I said in my earlier post, I am using Drupal for the big project that I care about - the Joomla sites were down and dirty because I needed them done "today" and they won't have much time spent on them. I would just love to see a similar huge selection of templates for Drupal.
Pleasing
Hm. I wasn't aware that theming would be that easy. Your layout is very pleasing and satisfies all my requirements.
How would your rate your skill with CSS and php?
How hard would it be to make this layout with adjustable width?
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
I'm sure theming isn't easy
I'm sure theming isn't easy at all. I'm just learning CSS and know very little about PHP. I'm used to writing sites in HTML in Notepad++ ;)
That site runs on Joomla, and I bought the theme from a professional developer very inexpensively - I didn't need to know how to do theme development.
That was the point I was trying to make - there are hundreds and hundreds of those attractive themes available for Joomla/Mambo either for free, or for a very small price (~$20). Imagine how many more people would decide to use Drupal if those same kinds of options were available? I would never have bothered to download and figure out Joomla last week just to do 2 quick websites when I could do them in Drupal - except for the lack of a wide choice of striking themes for Drupal.
I think the technology behind Drupal is superior, and the large number of ex-Mambo users on this site who have moved to Drupal attests to that. But the Mambo/Joomla crowd seems to have managed to attract far more graphic designers than Drupal has so far, for whatever reason.
Not hard
Drupal theming isnt hard, a simple theme can be built in a day without much of photoshop and flash.
Sunny
www.gleez.com | www.sandeepone.com
Strongly disagree
I had my first theme working in a day. Then I opened it in IE and my whole world fell apart.
No, a good theme is not that hard but a theme with phpTemplate that works with all Browsers and has a decent looking Forum is extremely hard to do (for someone with my level of php and css knowledge).
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Not a php issue
It all depends upon your HTML/CSS knowledge, nothing to do with php.
Sunny
www.gleez.com | www.sandeepone.com
I see
So I guess you have never looked here:
http://drupal.org/phptemplate
or tried to find out how to make a certain node type look different than the rest.
And how do you generate the html output in the first place?
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
Talking about simple theme
I am talking about simple theme not heavily customized theme. For heavily customize a theme like overriding theme functions it requires some php skills but that too it isn't hard.
Node Type:
For story node type you can create node-story.tpl.php and customize as you like. So you cna have different look fro story nodes from other node types.
Similarly you can customize themes on role based and term based, if you have minimum php skills and know how drupal works.
Sunny
www.gleez.com | www.sandeepone.com
Ooops
>So I guess you have never looked here:
>http://drupal.org/phptemplate
>or tried to find out how to make a certain node type look different than the rest.
I'm afraid that comment was inadvertently directed at the wrong person. He's one of the resident theming gurus, and the guy who wrote the "Fancy" theme - one of the ones that always works right.
;)
No wonder
No wonder he thinks its easy, LOL.
The point I wanted to make is that it is not all that easy for me to make a theme work. Lets say you don't need PHP skills, you still need some working CSS knowledge.
Neither I find too easy. In fact it is where I spent most of the time.
Andre
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http://www.opentravelinfo.com
http://www.aguntherphotography.com
do you think the dashboard mod could improve variety in themes?
Or at least the dashboard's concept of predefined block areas that the user plugs nodes into using the admin interface. Note--this is different from what I understand of drupal's 4.7 block concept which is a way to define block areas but through the usual html/css/phptemplate coding.
I'm probably not qualified to even comment in this thread, but as I represent the people who don't know much php or css or phptemplate stuff--those mentioned who just need to get a site or two up and that's it--I have a question for those of you who do know: couldn't an existing theme (or a new theme you're designing) be given a tremendous amount of visual customisability by giving people three or four different choices of dashboard layouts? At least for simple sites, anyway, and maybe for larger sites too. In 1/2 hour of reading the dashboard documentation, I was able to turn my 3-column dashboard theme into a 4-column theme. If the dashboard blocks were different sizes and shapes, then I could do a lot of things with my site.
I've used several other cms's too and none have anything on the dashboard module for allowing people to just plug their nodes into predefined block areas and instantly redefine the look of their site. No knowledge of phptemplate or css needed and no access needed to edit tpl files. Each site--even those using the same themes--could look different just based on which of the dashboard block areas the user puts content into and what kind of content--nodes, taxonomy, views lists, blocks, images, etc.
Maybe I'm just dreaming, but it seems like maybe it would be a simple thing for template designers or coders to come up with some dashboard themes to submit to the community that could be plugged into any theme or perhaps be used in conjunction with new themes. Am I wrong in thinking the concepts behind the dashboard have what it takes to bring layout variety to the drupal masses if they were embraced fully by those guiding drupal development? (as they have embraced merlinofchaos's views module)
Just an idea--I'm curious what you all think.