How hard is Drupal to theme?

The answer depends mostly on you and what you can do with php/css. Your site can definitely be implemented with Drupal - no question. For you to guage whether you will have success doing this, I suggest studying both the Xtemplate template, and Phptemplate as well. Xtemplate is in the main Drupal distro, and you can download phptemplate from the Downloads page.

Look in the file phptemplate\default\main.tpl.php from the phptemplate package and see how Drupal content gets transformed into HTML. You can change this file however you like. It currently is written to use a tableless design depending on CSS for layout, but you can change this to generate tables like in your template if you care to.

Take elements from the main.tpl.php file and decide where they should go in your template. For example, your navigation Restaurants, Pubs, Cinemas etc. could be replaced with [? if (is_array($links)): ?>

foreach ($links as $link):
• print $link

endforeach;

endif; (the line breaks are wrong here... look to the original in main.tpl.php)

When you've made your best guess as to where everything should go, name your template main.tpl.php, replace the current file, and fire up Drupal. Of course you'll have to have installed phptemplate, enabled the default template and added some links to the main navigation area on the phptemplate configuration page.

And this is only one way to go about it. Xtemplate is another great possibility, but you'll have to search the site for examples and study it yourself.

- Robert Douglass

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visit me at www.robshouse.net