Basic Theming

Yes, I agree that such a section would be good- and you (or I) can just add it! Go to the handbook and click "Add child page". See also, http://drupal.org/node/339

If you have the time just click this link:
http://drupal.org/node/add/book/parent/257

Or maybe it should be here, under "Theme how-to's":
http://drupal.org/node/add/book/parent/22803

If we get content that justifies a new section, then we'll start a new section. Not that big a deal. I just don't want to have sections with titles and no content. If you want to collaborate I have a scratch site you can have rights on to hammer out some content before moving it to Drupal.org.

I appreciate the value people might get from this post, but I think it important that it be edited (and not just to fix the typos).

Part of the problem is that a big chunk of that comment is vanilla CSS stuff - vanilla in the sense that it applies to CSS anywhere, not specifically Drupal. As has already been noted, it can be difficult to find things in the handbook. The more that gets put into the handbook that isn't specific to Drupal, the harder it will be to find things that are.

The other problem is that the comment is written specifically around blocks, while the tactics related to the way Drupal assigns classes and ids apply everywhere. So rather than having a page that says "here's how to exploit classes and ids to customize the appearance of a block", what's really needed is one that is more general, perhaps with some HOWTO sections that are more specialized.

Having said that, I expect that many people will find value from notes like that. Perhaps there should be a separate section or appendix for contributed case studies or tutorials that cross the boundaries of technologies.

Gary

Title fix; bear in mind when you change the title of issue replies it changes the title for the whole issue.

I skimmed the notes and while there's a lot of really good info there, I agree that at least parts of it indeed need to be rewritten a bit so that it's more like a basic theme tutorial and less like a "helping this one guy out" post, taken by itself.

Hopefully either panatlantica or pcwick or another interested party can take this on, as theming introductions are something that's been identified as an area documentation is lacking for some time.

Sigh. Sorry about that. Yet another reason for my belief that per-comment titles are worse than useless. I don't know why I did that - I always ignore the titles when reading, and usually ignore that field while replying. I think the difference is that the forums leave the title blank, while the issues section prefills the field. But the fact that the email notification uses the new comment title instead of the base title is a bug in the email notification, which I'll try to report. </end mini-rant>

Late last night, I started thinking in terms of an outline for an intro to themes, and here's what I came up with:

1. Overview of the theme system
1. Themes are about the look and feel
2. In Drupal, themes are are implemented via theme engines. We're only going to discuss the default, PHPTemplate.
3. An individual (PHPTemplate) theme can have .css files, tpl.php files, image files, .js files, and a general template.php file. They don't necessarily have to have all of these.
2. Easy theming using only CSS
1. Because of the power of CSS, a large amount of customization can be done using just .css files, without having to write any PHP
2. Drupal follows conventions for classes and ids that facilitate theming with just CSS. Here's the convention: <insert relevant parts of the aforementioned note by panatlantica>
3. Here's a basic example for blocks.
4. Here's another example for node content
3. Theme hooks
1. intro and examples about theme hooks...

If this seems to make sense, I'd be happy to work on a section. If stuff like this already exists, I haven't found it.

Regards,

Gary

I and some other people are willing to work on theming docs. An existing draft for new theme book setup can be found at http://scratch.blkmtn.org/node/9

While the focus should be on phptemplate, other theme systems and pure php themes need to be included as well.

And the Theme Developer's Guide http://drupal.org/node/509 was so difficult to find because.... ?

^.^

But last time I filed an edit for it, someone (Heine?) said that the theming pages were already going a slow but massive rewrite?

Anisa.

to get things rolling, I reposted most of the content from the original forum topic at:

http://scratch.blkmtn.org/node/19

http://scratch.blkmtn.org/node/20

I did very minimal editing.

Note- the site CSS doesn't seem to be making <strong> tags show as bold, nor put spaces after <p></p>

Since it looked to be activated, I just used the drupal cross-site login mechanism to login (hope no one minds)- i.e. you can login as pcwick@drupal.org with your drupal.org password.

Back in the good old days of hardcopy manuals, it was fairly common practice to have separate reference manuals and user guides. (They weren't called tutorials because they usually had more depth.) That's still the case for many large, successful projects, with Microsoft's Visual Studio/MSDN being one significant example. So yes, I think there's a need for both.

I don't think they should be combined. While the conversion to hypertext has many obvious advantages, one of the disadvantages is that it's easy to get lost in a maze of twisty little passages. It can be difficult to know what to read next, difficult to find something you were just reading yesterday but forgot to bookmark, and so on. I don't see any problem with having a strong top-level distinction between tutorial/user guide and reference material. To some extent, that distinction already exists when comparing the API documentation to the handbook; it's obvious that they're different if for no other reason than the sidebar being on opposite sides.

Gary

closing dead thread