Multiple Templates: Help, how do I style each section?

yes, yes, yes! this would be so helpful-- an accessible way for non-programmers to customize templates per node and/or section/page would quadruple drupal's appeal! i frequently troll this site hoping for headway in this area, and am so grateful for such a well-summarized question.

i for example would love to use drupal for blogs, but without a non-php-intensive way to customize blog designs, this doesn't really fly. blogs are about personality--- every time i go to a nuke (or drupal for that matter) site where blogs are indistinguishable for one another, it's a big UI turn-off. where's the personality? without this kind of design customization what we consisently end up with is a generic modular look. even when you do design a site theme you're happy with-- you often want to clearly distinguish site sections from one another, right? breadcrumbs and navigation tools are great, as are node-specific blocks, but more layout and design specificity would kick ass and really expand the appeal of drupal.

i'm thrilled about flexinode and avatar and node image support in the themes that have been developed.... all that's needed is to take this a little further, so that non-coders or softcore geeks can better brand, style site sections. from there another obvious evolution would be to provide not just theme-switching but template-switching options for user blogs --- so that users could specify what style or layout they want their blog to use (and be displayed to all that visit it), and plug in their own avatar, logo, mission or tagline, etc.

Hi,

erikhopp on June 26 post this about style by content type in xTemplate.

http://drupal.org/node/view/8084

what type of customizations do you need? can it all be accomplished with CSS? If so, we need to be even more vigilant about our markup, and then this is easy. For example, I'd like to count on a DIV being present when a page starts outputting its main content well. That div should have a class supplied by the menu system. For example, CLASS="node edit" or CLASS="user view". Notice that I've replaced the slashed in the path with spaces. Thats allows for maximum CSS flexibility. With these CSS classes in place, you may stylize each page usign 'path' as a key.

Similarly, when nodes are output, it makes sense for all themes to lay down a CLASS='node form' for example. That lets you apply CSS just to specific node types.

This url scheme needs more thought, but I think the menu system can inform our CSS classes and open up themeing by page or by group pages.

if you need HTML (as opposed to CSS) to change based on section or node type, you need to put that switching logic in your .theme file or in your template file for xtemplate, phptemplate, etc. Current Drupal won't help you much here, and I don't foresee it coming soon.

It was mentioned that this feature may be accomplished in release 4.5. I'm seriously considering drupal for our university department site, but can't find a clear answer on whether this styling by section is now possible.
anyone?
thanks

As a newbie drupal admin currently working on a completely tableless design, I get the feeling that this will be more easily achiveable for me, even with any hardcoding. My basical xtemplate layout is merely about structure, and I'm listing the individual things that can be themed, for example the blocks. While the majority of them will be one bog standard way, it is possible to have several individual ones positioned elswhere on the page.

*loves css*

I'm bookmarking this thread though, for reference's sake. This design is going to take me upwards of two weeks, even without the graphical side.

I just released a module called "sections", that allows themes per sections. The here mentioned feature can be implemented in an easy way in this module.

And if this solved you problem, would you be so kind to report back that it helped? This will help others whom are looking for the same solution.

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