Warning - I am sure this post is stupid but you Drupal guys seem nicer than most. So thanks ahead of time for your help.
I have googled and searched the forums to death, but unable to decide how best to approach this.
I currently have a site for my old high school chums back in Nebraska using Joomla. I started it as a joke and it has spread like cancer into a full fledged alumni community. I liked Joomla because I could have a "pretty" site in a few minutes. I just found a theme I liked and replaced the header.png image, and walla, my own site. (http://www.dailygeneva.com) Over time I found Joomla/Mambo restrictive, especially in the area of blogs.
I would like to switch the site over to Drupal because it rocks for what I want it for, but all the default themes.....excuse me... look uh, not so "pretty". I can hear my hillbilly friends now, "What did you do to your web site, it looks crappy?"
I am fairly comfortable with HTML/mysql/php but not so in CSS. I like the look of the spreadfirefox theme (curvy tabs), but am looking for something similar to what I already have http://www.dailygeneva.com, but the menu could be different.
Any advice/hints for me to customize my own theme to do what I want. It seems like everyone likes the phptemplate engine and starts with the boxgrey theme. What tutorials are best for a beginner? I am lazy, so I really don't want to hack together my own theme, but with Drupal it kinda looks like I have to, no?
John in Seattle
I personally like the bryght.com template and the drupal.org template, but I am sure they took a lot of time from experienced people.
Comments
You site would not be
You site would not be exceptionally difficult to do starting with box_gray as a starting point. It's a fixed width three column theme. You can either start with an XTemplate based theme (such as modifying blue marine or a PHPTemplate based theme box_grey or the PHPTemplate port of blue marine port.
PHPTemplate will be the default theme engine for 4.7 and the vast majority of fancy stuff you can do with Drupal themeing is done in PHPTemplate. This may not be important for you though and XTemplate has worked successfully for many years.
http://support.bryght.com/articles/converting-css-html-design-phptemplat...
http://urlgreyhot.com/personal/weblog/grid_based_design_part_2_designing...
-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