By ESBertrand on

Hi there. I'm a total newbie to Drupal, but will say I'm well-versed in programming and database architecture. (I'm a .NET developer so I know Microsoft well. Please don't hold it against me. :)

I just set up Drupal 6.15 on an IIS box, with little trouble (had to update folder permissions). I created a new template in Drupal from scratch (using a basic, generic HTML template I have), using the instructions at this link:

http://mustardseedmedia.com/podcast/episode3

Creating the template itself was easy, but now that it's in place, and I updated Drupal to use that template, now I cannot login at all. Even if I go to the login page, I see only the login tabs, but there are no text boxes or buttons. I'm stuck! I even tried to update the variables table to change the theme, but that did nothing.

The site is currently staged here. Help!

Erik

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

yelvington’s picture

yelvington commented

1. Remove the theme (or move it to a directory outside the docroot). Drupal will fall back to a raw presentation that looks terrible. Go to /user and log in.

2. Define a standard Drupal theme (such as Garland) as your admin theme, so you won't accidentally lock yourself out of your site.

3. Restore your custom theme and start debugging.

It looks as if you might not be printing $content in your page.tpl.php.

All of your navigational links are hardcoded, and you have paths starting with /image. This is OK until you start changing your site organization and moving things around in the filesystem, which breaks everything. Best practice is to use the Drupal menu system to manage your links, and place your theme-specific images in an image folder inside the theme directory. Any paths should be printed as so:

<img src="<?php print base_path() . path_to_theme() .'/' ?>images/whatever.jpg" />
ESBertrand’s picture

ESBertrand commented

yelvington, thanks so much for the quick reply, and on New Years Day no less! I'll make these changes and perhaps tread more carefully going forward. I am reading the docs, honest -- I guess I needed to read ahead a bit more before jumping in!

Best Regards,

Erik

ESBertrand’s picture

ESBertrand commented

... thanks for the tips on pathing and the use of static links. I'm definitely planning to manage the menu hierarchy using the Drupal system, and will use the path you suggested for the theme assets. I had the menu links hard-coded for now so I could get a page running.

I'm really encouraged by the wealth of documentation, and the support I see in the forums. Much appreciated!

Erik