How do I create a custom theme or make a not so obviously default theme?

First you take a deep breath and think about the wonder of life... :-)
Then you take a close up look at your own post above and wonder why you imply that the people on the Drupal community are not on "the real web".
Then you aknowledge that being able to churn out really cool designs is not something you learn from a 5 minutes tutorial.
Then you realize that there's a reason some of the people here actually DO code in PHP.

I see that you have done a lot of good research. I don't think the tutorials and the documentation is that bad.

Answers:
1) No there's no straight forward tutorial which will magically give you a great design theme. You need to be a designer as well.
2) Yes - one theme will work for all node types.
3) You just need talent, patience and knowledge. You need to be willing to learn - in order to turn out Terminus.
4) I don't know how much time it took to layout GOV20.
5) How on earth should anyone know the answer to that one?
6) Are you serious - or are you just a pain in the a..? :-P

Seriously.. I recommend that you take 6 month of "rookie" time on Drupal.org playing around, and then when you've learned the basics, come back and ask the questions again. The thing is - either you spend money (which you apparently don't have) or you spend time. I can assure you that your time will be well spend on Drupal.

Best

Gunnar Langemark
http://www.langemark.com

You can achieve a huge amount by just making a copy of the Bluemarine folder and getting to work on your new themes style.css file, and uploading some new image files. You could start from another theme, but make sure it is a clean simple one to begin with but still includes all the 'features' - that's why I recommend Bluemarine. Taking away unnecessary theme features from a complete one, while building up the CSS from a simple base set of styles is the key.

You don't need any PHP knowledge until you want to get trickier and start rearranging the HTML markup by editing the templates or overriding some of the core display functions.

Even then rearranging PHPTemplate files without changing the logic is pretty easy for a non coder.

But the bulk of the work in a custom theme is CSS (as it should be). If you are up to speed with CSS selectors and know how to override existing styles you'll be sweet. Don't forget to use the Firefox web developer extension for digging around in the styles and HTML blocks etc.

Just don't expect to pull off advanced stuff like those designs you listed straight away with your first attempts. Keep your expectations realistic to begin with and slowly build up your understanding.

--
Anton
New to Drupal? | Forum posting tips | Troubleshooting FAQ
Example Knowledge Base built using Drupal

:( I feel your pain, I just started using drupal a few days ago and I was completley lost on making "themes". after research and posts where i hardly got any feedback because i was too stupid to check the handbooks (who woulda thought???!) anyways from what i gathered making a theme is mostly editing stylesheets/css. pick an easy theme and just "hack" it to bits. after you get that try advancing. lol that's all i can say because im still learning to "hack" the themes. :(

good luck.

First question - could you design a site using static HMTL and CSS? Build the graphics, the styles, the code etc? For what you are after, this is core knowledge.

Once you can do that Drupal themes can output the same code. Sure it takes time to learn, but... of course it takes time to learn! It's a huge area of skills and knowledge.

I doubt everyone here is a professional designer, but everyone here shares a passion for Drupal and a desire to improve their skills. And most have a generous nature if asked nicely ;)

May be such list (if exist) can be used as Holy Grail for all "semi-designers" (like me). Thanks to offline wysiwyg-editors like Dreamweaver, I can create something more or less pretty-looking. And after that, I just need to know, what are all these theme variables do? Possible example:

<? print $breadcrumbs; ?> // shows  navigation-paths
<?php print $logo; ?> // show logo
<?php print $content ?> // main content area
...

Althought it seems to be self explanatory and listed in default themes, sometimes go a little bit deeper into details needed to be more creative (to split $content, for example). 3d party modules adds some extra variables sometimes.

And finally the question (and the only answer at the moment) is: the improved search function at drupal.org :-)
Am I right?

---
http://itnovosti.ru - Russian site powered by Drupal.

fancy is made from bluemarine, and has more colors if you want to begin with that.
-----
Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site written using language that Drupal beginners and intermediate users can understand. Which version to use? http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46

Hi,

In my opinion, the best thing to do -and it has been said before- is pick a theme close to your design (which has all features working and in a good looking style!), and start playing around with the CSS.

In order to do so, there are some nice tools around that might be helpful:

- http://www.sitevista.com/cssvista

- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/179
- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2108

- http://www.culturedcode.com/xyle
- http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper

- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2104

Me, myself and I still prefer CSS editing in Dreamweaver (code view), but hey, just take a look and see what these tools can do for you!

___________________
discover new oceans
lose sight of the shore

I just started making my drupal theme just this week. It takes a bit of time but really look over the drupal handbook with the theme developers guide. Really to do a theme you need to know CSS and HTML with a tiny bit of PHP. I just learned PHP last winter and am still new at it. If you have the layout already designed then make it into a HTML page then try to plug that into a Drupal Theme. It's not that bad. I still haven't finished my first theme but it isn't stressing me out like hacking the modules was.

One question I am working on a theme for the different node types. For me to grab the points I need I am pretty sure I need the contest ID number is it possible to grab that information from them template for the node type.

I found my way here by following a link in Robert Douglass's ebook and I have to say this is a highly entertaining and informative thread. I really appreciate the contributors patience and commitment , particularly as you are giving freely of your time and knowledge :)
I too have just about managed to get a basic site together based on Drupal 4.7 and had started to think about how themes could be amended or created. And now I know where to start looking! It's another first step on an endless journey. Many thanks to all!

I find that I like some or most of certain themes, but all of no themes -- that is, there isn't a single theme out there other than this Drupal site's that I 100% like (and we can't have this one since it is proprietary, heheh). I've tried using a lot of user-made ones and many of them are buggy (especially under different browsers). The sad part is the nice-looking ones, like "Lincoln's Revenge", tend to be bugged to all heck (I used LR for a while and tried to de-bugify it but it's sadly a huge mess), and the ones that aren't buggy, like Box Grey, are frankly hideous (IMO).

So, I finallly started doing some of my own, and I have been pleased with the result (realizing not everyone will have the same taste, of course). I borrowed slightly from the basic color scheme of the main Drupal site here (mostly, just the idea of lights and dark blues), but went with my own decisions about things like how thick to make borders of boxes and whatnot.

As a starting base, I used Bluemarine, which comes with 4.7.0 drupal as a standard PHPTemplate engine theme. What I like about BlueMarine is that its CSS makes sense -- which sadly most of the custom ones don't seem to. I don't have dreamweaver or any other CSS editor -- I just plain text (TextPad or Emacs) editing and edit it all by hand. Basically I have FTP running (SmartFTP on Windows), and I make a few changes at a time, then upload it and refresh the page and see what happened... I use trial and error and slowly develop the theme that way.

I make sure to not do this with the default theme. I left BlueMarine as the theme of the site and just changed to "Cafe" (which is what I call my main theme) on my account... so if things messed up, it would not hurt anything but me. :) Once I got it all set, then I made it the site-wide default. I got a bunch of messages from the site members right after it saying they liked it way better than BlueMarine, so there we go. Of course, this is all personal taste, for which, as the saying goes, there is no accounting. :)

Now then, as to how to actually edit things and know what to edit. That, unfortunately, is difficult. There's no real good documentation on what attributes to modify on CSS to change the way things look. So you have to know some HTML, and some CSS, and in some cases you just have to guess. The problem is of course not the standard things, like h1, h2, p, em, and so on, which anyone with a little CSS knowledge knows.... Rather it's all the proprietary stuff, like ".comment" or ".node .title". There are so many "div" settings on so many different characteristics in drupal (to make it highly customizable) that it can take a lot of work to get everything looking right (forum tables, oh my goodness... took me forever because there are so many sub-variants... active, even, odd, container, etc).

What I started doing was going to the bottom of the style.css sheet (since I now have made 3 or 4 themes for the site -- I use one for each organic group just to make it clear to the users what group they're browsing in), and making a comment block like this:

/* **********************************
* Everything below here is modified for this theme
*********************************** */

And then any time I made a change to a block, I moved it down below that comment, so I know to look down there for changes. Since I like most of the basic options of BlueMarine other than colors and sidebars (I prefer boxed to full stripe sidebars), I left that stuff all alone (font sizes and the like, for the most part). The main thing I change is color and maybe the occasional background image. By collecting everything down there, it makes it easier for me to see.

The other way people sometimes do it is to make something like a colors.css sheet (Sands does this), with all the color attributes. But this separates them from the other attributes of each item, so that the font-size of an h1 element is in one file, the color in another, and so on. Some people find this works for them... I do not. I find that I like to see ALL the settings of a given element in one place -- color, fontsize, text decoration, whatever. This will again be up to personal taste.

Ultimately I think theming has a lot of trial and error involved... and if you know some HTML and CSS (I didn't know any CSS when I started but I'm OK with it now), I suggest you just roll up your sleeves and dive in. Start with a theme you like and make a copy. Call it MyWorkingTheme or something... and then just open up the .css sheet(s) and start making some changes. It helps to have a website or photoshop or something open to help you play with colors. I use photoshop to do that. And of course if you have dreamweaver or something you can play around with that, but I don't have any of that.

Hope this helps.

Found these two interesting topics at Drupal:
- http://drupal.org/node/46995
- http://drupal.org/node/57543

Following these, I've found an excellent analysis of Drupal CSS:
- http://urbits.com/_/content/20060406/drupal_article01.php

Definitely worth a view (with thanks to Simon)!

___________________
discover new oceans
lose sight of the shore

Gov 2.0 uses the Mollio theme, apparently with very few customization.
Here's a link you might be interested in: Converting a CSS/HTML design to PHPTemplate. Although a little old, I believe it is still valuable material for those like you - and myself! - who are starting to find our ways through themeing.

Durval Tabach