Of course you want to make your new Drupal site look and feel as much as possible like your old MT site. This article might help on the way in doing so.

Luckily this is not too hard, so non-PHP programmers can re -create the old styles, so that they can be used on the new Drupal site. To do this, you do not need to know PHP, but you do need to know at least basic CSS coding.

Since I do not know the way MT templates are built and created, I will stick only to the Drupal part of the story. That's not a too big problem, because, as long as you understand the way Drupal uses its themes, you will be able to modify little things so that they /look/ like the MT styles, but do not have to be the same. After all, this is not an article about stealing, its about how to port your own MT creations to Drupal. So bear in mind: do not steal!

Drupal knows many methods for theming. It depends on your own preferences what theming method you choose. This, however is far out of the scope of this article, and I stick to the easiest method, in my opinion, PHP template.

The PHP template can be installed as any other theme, read the shipped install text on how to do this. There are numerous articles on drupal.org that explain in detail how to configure PHP template, go look for them yourself and use them to configure the template. This document is not a tutorial on how to use PHP template, after all.

Creating a new template under PHPtemplate is as easy as copy-pasting one of the folders. Rename it to something you like: MyTemplate for example. The best is to copy the MoveableToDrupal folder and paste it as MyTemplate.

Now some technical blabla on the way PHPtemplate works. Drupal knows themes, just the way most CMS'es do. The file phptemplate.theme is the actual theme. The big difference is that PHPtemplate is not just a theme, like chameleon, or blue robot, but acts more like a layer. It allows you to create templates in the theme. Get it? No?

Alright: Drupal has themes. You can install a theme and the look and feel of your site has changed. But PHPtemplate is not really one of them. It uses some fancy coding to create another templating system. So it is a template in a theme. All the folders inside the PHPtemplate folder are templates.

Got it now?

So inside those sub-folders (for example the folder MyTemplate) there are some files. Some of them are styles, some images and a few are .php files. They are the actual templates. If you know enough PHP just open them and move some of the code around.

But now over to the real stuff: using the style sheet(s) to re-create your MT design.

As said above: you will need CSS skills to do this, if you don't have those, well, post a message on drupal.org or on the support list and tell you've got some money or something else (stories, tutorials, modules, clients with loads of money) lying around you wish to get rid of. And ask if anybody is interested in receiving that money (or that something else) for the simple task of rewriting the MT CSS.

Back to business: Drupal can have virtually any HTML DOM, but in general it is kind of similar to that of MT. In PHP template, we have sidebars and a main content. Drupal uses the id .node instead of .blog and it has some more differences, of course.

Some basic changes you should make are:

These are some basic changes, that should get you on the road. For all other stiles and selectors, you should heave a look at the style sheet in MoveableToDrupal.