how to design a new theme from scratch?
gozleg - October 3, 2009 - 10:07
Hi.
I know the solution to this question is available on this forum but the problem with the amount of posts over here, it is very difficult to get the right answer; neither with the searching capabilities offered over here.
What I want to know, after the designs are done and sliced with Photoshop for instance, the CSS worked out in Dreamweaver (or whatever other programmes), how do we implement it onto the drupal platform.?
I really need to know this as there's nowhere, where an appropriate answer is given.
Thanking you in advance.
The Theming Handbook
I would recommend looking at an existing theme before starting from scratch. The best place to start is http://drupal.org/theme-guide.
Regards,
Steve Halleman
...
Your work-flow is wrong, or at least not what we do.
Leave the PSD slicing and dicing and CSS until AFTER you have built the Drupal site. You need to theme the output of the Drupal site, trying to backport an existing sliced and diced HTML comp to Drupal is tiresome and you will end up writing most of the CSS again, and probably end up slicing the PSD again as well. I say "probably" because it just depends, as always.
Drupal is going to generate a lot of HTML and CSS classes for you, its this output you need to theme. You can modify this output a lot in the theme layer using templates, preprocess functions and theme overrides.
You'll need to know about those things so read the Drupal 6 theme guide and become familiar with Drupals core templates and CSS also. In essence if you are going to start from scratch - scratch means learning how to theme Drupal.
What I would suggest, that unless you are going to become a Drupal themer (in which case starting from scratch is a good thing to do for learning), I would start with a starter theme - two very good ones are Adaptivetheme and Genesis. This will shave a LOT of time off your theme build because you can just install one of these themes and start theming, rather then spend the 100 or so hours of research and learning it will take you to emulate what these themes are doing for you right from the start. Think that not even Drupal developers build themes from scratch anymore, we all use one the many great starter themes.
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