Theme development

I mean, really, how many of us have actually taken the time out to view the page source which is generated by the chamelelon theme? It generates tons of non-sensical, unruly tangled HTML. I understand that we all get ants in our pants sometimes, especially when we see it working on the screen, but I would be embarrassed to have released that theme file with my name in it. Seriously.

On the other hand, while working with the theme file in order to get it to yield some valid (or closer to valid) XHTML I was awestruck by the possibilities of this theming method. If you actually could get a plain php theme to yield XHTML which was completely valid, then applying a CSS style to that page would be a breeze. Is it really necesscary to have table based themes and intermediate engines involved, when we have complete control over the look and feel of the page with just CSS? Sure, if you want to offer some customization options to those who aren't well-versed in CSS or PHP, I can understand, but I would have to argue that learning CSS would be a much more valuable way to spend time than banging one's head around to learn PHP, theme engines, template files, AND CSS. What do we need to do to get there?

First, clean up the output. By simply keeping track of the page source while editing the plain php theme file, you can achieve the correct indentation to nest your tags. This is the first step to acheiving a source XHTML that we can work with. Also, by creating clean, valid output, the page becomes infinitely extensible. For instance, if I can make sense of and read what my XHTML output is (which is not currently the case) then if I need to add a few div tags with ids to nest a few components of the page in my .theme file, this is easy. A new class? No problem. Currently, due to the undicpherable output of the theme file, this is not possible.

On drupal site, the following link (http://themes.drupal.org/?theme=gespaa) from this page (http://drupal.org/project/gespaa) does not work. I get a 403 Forbidden "You don't have permission to access / on this server" error.

Wow... i'm frustrated. Does anyone have advice on creating a fixed width theme from scratch? I'm finding the process to be very frustrating as I'm unfamilar with a lot of the HTML and CSS objects that drupal creates. As a result when I try to change the style of something it won't take effect because the object has already been defined in drupal.css etc.

Is there a process that some of you have adopted in creating new templates?

I Would appreciate insight into fixing these pages:

I just got my drupal 4.6 up and running. I'm very new to this drupal let alone creating themes and modules. I have gone through the secontion on Developing for Drupal, but I still have no clue why I would need the engine and once I have the engine and downloaded, how do I use it? I can understand the part about modifying an existing theme...but to create new theme with the engine is where I got confused. What's the purpose of the engine, why need them, and how to use to help me create new theme? I'm currently using Dreamweaver Studio 8 to edit my website...but like to try Drupal.

I would like to change the label "Title" in my add flexinode form. Is this possible?

To be clear - I am not talking about the custom fields I have added but the uneditable required field "Title".
I just want to change the label for this field to something other than "Title".

I have successfully created a flexinode phptemplate but this has no impact on the form.

Hi everybody,

It's more or less 1 week that I'm tryin' Drupal, and I've discovered some interesting things.... but..... which is the best way to create a button menu for the navigation in the upper zone of the page?! I mean, I've created my module but I didn't find a way to modify or create the navigatio bar....

I can create a new block with all the node on the side, but is not the same -_-'

I'll really appreciate your help;
Thanks