Theme Layout Steps

The first Target for any Beginners using Drupal, as from my personal experience, is that you may feel free to test what ever you may want to change in a Test Environment on a local server. Here some usefully documentation and tutorials Web Server

I will mention here some of the action I did so to achieve as many intensive as possible an all around impression of the Drupal Theme Structure.

Of course You may say that following the good Drupal Manual and Documentation will be the most rational and efficient method to learn all the Module functions and the implementation of Drupal.

Yes, but I write here as a Beginners and for Beginners who want and try something as fast as possible and find out that Drupal is really great, even for people who have no Knowledge about PHP and CSS.

CSS Theme Layout experiment - Steps:

1. After installation of a standard Drupal (Whatever Version you may use) try to change a little bit the Theme.
2. Bluemarine (v.4.x) and Garland (v. 5.x 6.x) are the default Themes for Drupal, but you may find more THEMES that suite your needs here at the beginning.
3. You will find all Theme in the root folder ( /www/sites/drupal/themes ) of your Drupal installation in the Themes Folder.
4. Before you start to experiment with the Themes of your choice I suggest you to make a copy of your default Theme in the theme folder and name it " my_theme" (or whatever you like).
5. Now you may go to Administer --> Site Building --> Themes and notice that you have one more Theme installed. Try to activate and save configuration. Change your default theme to the theme you cloned (my_theme) and save configuration. You will see that it result in exactly the same theme but you can now start to play around and experiment with the .css file and gain some experience with it.
6. Changing the different field values in the .css file may have different effects and results to the point that you may messing up completely your Theme Layout. So it will be also useful before making to extreme changes to create an user account for this purpose only.
7. So go to Administer --> User Management --> Roles and create an role like "developer" or whatever name refer for your purposes. Now you may give to your Developer User account the permission to change THEME. Doing so you have always the chance to use your Drupal Test Version again login with your first account (first User account with all permissions) , if you mess up something so that nothing is visible after your experiments.
8. Important: never delete the default Theme of Drupal !!
   Bluemarine (Drupal 4.x) Garland (Drupal 5.x - 6.x) because they will be always needed for running standard routines like Cron, Update, Status Report .. etc.
9. The styles file for the Themes you will find it the theme folder and they are all marked with the .css extension. You can edit them with a text editor so to change and experiment with the different layout-field-values.
10. The file styles.css is the css (Cascading Style Sheets) responsible for the whole css layout of the THEME you are using (you have chosen as default Theme). About CSS you may find here usefully informations.
to be continued