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By shanytopper on
Hi guys.
I installed Drupal on my host about a month ago, and still I got mant problams.
The main one being with my sites Themes.
You see, the new site is a conversion of an older site, and there for must keep with the look and feel of the older site.
So I said to my self, no problam, I'll just build myself a theme that will take care of that, right?
Wrong.
I consider myself rather ok in programin, using languages such as JAVA, C++, Visaul Basic, and so on.
However, I just can't seem to understand anything about the programing of themes.
I tries learning CSS and PHP, but I just can't seem to understand how does things work with themes.
Prehaps I'm not smart enugh, I dont know...
Yes, I have read the handbook in here. I havn't understood anything from it.(Really, nothing)
So, my questions are:
1 - Is there a way to create templates without the knowladge of CSS and PHP? (such as a drag and drop program/module or something simular, mybe?)
2 - If not, where can I find Tutorials about the very basic of theme editing? (stuff like, this is how you change to background, this is how you change the font, this is how you change the header, and so on..)
With many thanks
Shany Topper
Comments
CSS is King
Learning CSS in a fundamental way is the key to Drupal themes. If you want a good tutorial on how to use Drupal's theming system, Chapter 5 of the book in my signature is a very good resource.
- Robert Douglass
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My Drupal book: Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress
Certainly you could build
Certainly you could build a template using tools such as Dreamweaver or any other WYSIWYG-Editor. However, you will be missing a lot of possiblities that are possible with CSS.
PHP is not so much the problem for building straight forward templates or themes. There are several template engines available for Drupal. Most people's favourite is phpTemplate. This is pretty straight forward. Maybe have a look at a phpTemplate theme which you can find in the download section. You'll have a page.tpl.php which is nothing more then a regular HTML file with the layout, and some PHP tags that will put in content at the various places of the layout. After studying two or three phpTemplate page.tpl.php files, you'll certainly get the idea what is going on inside these files. With your background, you don't need deep PHP knowledge to decifer what these functions in this theme page do and be able to reproduce these functions in your own template.
phpTemplate further has various little template files like node.tpl.php - all they do is define the basic layout (or rather the tags) that surround the content itself.
As I said, basically you can use Dreamweaver to help you out (or any other WYSIWYG-editor). However, learning CSS will help you a lot and it will help the layout as so much more can be done with CSS and at the same time, you will be able to use recources so much better with CSS then with the traditional way of doing web pages.
Certainly Dreamweaver has the capability of building CSS files... BUT: the problem is, no software can "think ahead" in what you are going to design. However, CSS requires some thinking before you start. How to use background images in a smart way by e.g. just repeating a narrow strip across the screen, placing elements on the page by absolute/relative positioning etc. -- So all of this is quite difficult to achieve with a WYSIWYG-editor - yet - as they simply cannot "think ahead" what you might have in your mind design wise. So learning pure CSS will generate much smaller files and will help loading pages much much quicker.
Get inspired by visiting the famous CSS Zen Garden and have a look how some people made pages on directory pages like CSS Beauty. Analyzing how others achieved something is a great help to learn CSS.
There are also some books which are really worth reading and which help you get going quickly and painlessly in CSS. A book I quite like is Eric Meyer's "on CSS". But have a search yourself on Amazon - best start out with one of those books similar to the "on CSS" by Eric Meyer. You won't propably find typical reference books so handy at this early stage. If you need a good reference tool later on, I can only recommend VisiBone's "Card Collection".
The book mentioned by robertDouglas: Buiding Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB and WordPress can also be recommended highly as this focuses very much on how to do things with Drupal in a very easy to understand manner.
Apart from all this, there is tons of documentation in the Drupal Handbooks. The ones you might be most interested in reading are the Customization and theming section, especially the chapter Theme developer's guide (with a special strongpole on phpTemplate theme engine, as well as the PHPTemplate Theme Snippets to use PHP stuff to spice up your themes with extra functions!
Hope this helps! Do start learning CSS, you're gonna love it!