Drupal theming for dummies

By clarknova on 12 May 2006 at 22:35 UTC

Hi guys,

I'm taking my first steps with Drpal and so far I really am impressed byt its power. The process of creating or adapting a new theme is however kind of arcane for me, note that I'm a guy with html+css experience but after digging the phptemplate documentation for some hours, my head is spinning. All I want is adapt my design to Drupal, copy and paste some tags, I don't want to customize node types(yet) or anything I just want the basic Drupal functionality with the skin I created on it, are there any tutorials on how to accomplish this? I know this sound kind of basic and lazy but my knowledge of php is rather rudimentary, can I use Drpal without learning php?

Thanks a lot.

Comments

it's not hard

Bahattee commented 12 May 2006 at 22:49

if you allready have html design copy everything to a new file and name it page.tpl.php. then open one existing phptemplate theme and you will se that it's plain html+css with some variables that print out sections. for example if you want print the footer on the theme and you allready have this:

<td class="footer">Copyright &copy; 2006</td>

all you have to do is replace footer with code that prints out dinamic footer:

<td class="footer"><?php print $footer_message ?></td>

most of the codes are allready in themes like bluemarine. just check it ... if you know html and css, you won't have to learn php to make a theme.

It's easy, but if you've

solipsist commented 13 May 2006 at 01:32

You can't make themes for 4.7 without learning a little PHP. If you've never seen PHP code before it might seem daunting. Try playing around with BlueMarine and change this and that on your sandbox site. It's a good way to get a feel for it!

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http://www.jakob-persson.com

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Leancept – Digital effect and innovation agency

help

cenbank.c commented 2 June 2006 at 08:43

please i want this php to be send mail please get me this. thankz

Look at

sepeck commented 13 May 2006 at 01:49

Look at this
http://support.bryght.com/articles/converting-css-html-design-phptemplat...
ignore references tot he theme editor, just use notepad2, crimson editor or vim or such.

-Steven Peck
---------
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}

Yeah, this looks like it

clarknova commented 13 May 2006 at 03:44

This is exactly what I meant, a hands on, quick tutorial. I'm willing to learn PHP, of course, but right now I need to feel I can use drupal and learn it in depth while improving my site.

This is brilliant! if anyyone knows of more such howto's and tutorials, please let me know!

Thanks a lot, guys!

and this one

sepeck commented 2 June 2006 at 14:55

is a little basic as well
http://www.blkmtn.org/node/336

-Steven Peck
---------
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}

Advanced Course

coreb commented 2 June 2006 at 13:31

Nick Lewis posted a tutorial within the last day or so that you may be interested in once you've got more of the basics down.

Thanks, guys, I've been

clarknova commented 2 June 2006 at 16:56

Thanks, guys, I've been taming PHPTemplate for the last weeks and now I can say I can pretty much make Drupal look the way I wanted. It costed me a couple of sleepless nights(weeks?) and crappy days but I'm pretty much over the monster.

In the end, Drupal is not much different to theme than Wordpress, for example, Wp only has a very good set of documents on how to do it, though. And certainly more flexibility.

One thing that annoys me is the way come things are encapsulated and not handy for the designers to manipulate, for example, how in the world do you extract the date variables, what if I want to put the day separated from week and month? I posted a forum topic on this but it seems the only way to accomplish that is hacking Drupal in some way, something I'm not able to.

All in all, a good experience. I can 'feel' the power of Drupal, but I can feel its shortcomings, too. How many clicks to get to modify a template or a path? I feel I need a map sometimes.

Well, thanks for all the kind answers, some day I swear I'll learn PHP, some day....

I think in the node.tpl.php

sepeck commented 2 June 2006 at 17:33

I think in the node.tpl.php you'll want to take out
<?php print $submitted ?>
and replace it with
<?php print $date ?>
and
<?php print $name ?>

More information on readily available variables for node.tpl.php can be found here: http://drupal.org/node/11816

More information on phptemplate themeing can be found here: http://drupal.org/phptemplate

And you can do a ton of stuff, so I'm told, with template.php that can change the behavior of forms and Nick's got a great tutorial here http://www.nicklewis.org/node/841 that evidently only requires you have

the ability to lie about a lack of knowledge of PHP

-Steven Peck
---------
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}

Yeah, but how do you

clarknova commented 3 June 2006 at 16:08

Yeah, but how do you take the day out of $date, is there something like $date->day, $date->hour?

i think dates are handled

harry slaughter

Omaha NE USA

commented 2 August 2006 at 05:33

i think dates are handled pretty well in drupal.

drupal uses 3 date formats that are each configureable (in admin/settings under 'date settings')

if you want a format not reflected in the choices, you can set your own format directly in the db, though be very careful, the data is serialized and if you don't know what that means, you could break the value.

--
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More Drupal for dummies

saraic commented 21 November 2007 at 12:22

Hi,

This thread has been really helpful so far, as like the original poster, I am very much at home with (X)HML and CSS but when it comes to PHP, well I'm lost. Completely befuddled. I do really like what Drupal does and the way in which it works as it seems perfect for my current project but I really do need a step by step guide to get me started (with as little jargon as humanly possible)

Can I just ask - do the general principles for theming differ in drupal 6? I have found lots of resources for v5 and below but nothing yet for 6 and I wanted some idea of what I'm letting myself in for.

I don't know if there's perhaps a particular set of classes names that I need to use in my CSS for stuff such as calendars etc?

Thanks in advance.

This thread is for Drupal 4.7.

sepeck commented 21 November 2007 at 19:15

Drupal 5 had many improvements though the basic theory remained the same, many specific changed slightly. These changes were documented in upgrading your theme. This trend will occur for Drupal 6 as well and there is significant documentation for Drupal 6 theming, it's just not visibly published at this time as things are still in flux.

Calendars would depend on the contributed module you are using.

-Steven Peck
---------
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}

Drupal theming for dummies

Comments

it's not hard

It's easy, but if you've

help

Look at

Yeah, this looks like it

and this one

Advanced Course

Thanks, guys, I've been

I think in the node.tpl.php

Yeah, but how do you

i think dates are handled

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This thread is for Drupal 4.7.

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