Learning How To Theme in Drupal, Starting at Square One
Ivan | Sun, 2006-07-09 07:58Now, for the 99.999217 percent of the population that doesn't understand why drupal theming is straightforward, I have bad news. You've got a lot of learning to do. In the beginning, the task of learning how to build a solid drupal theme is going to appear daunting, painful, confusing, sadistic, cruel, unusual, and most importantly, boring. I know these things because it wasn't long ago that I first started teaching myself HTML/CSS/PHP and began to learn how to apply it to drupal (November 2004). So forgive a LONG answer to a question that sought a short answer. Rest assured a short answer would have been a fairy tale.
I really hate these CMS systems that make it so difficult to theme. I wish they could come up with some true WYSIWYG system, or at least something where you simply enter in the colors/artwork in text entry boxes to theme. Dealing with PHP and CSS is a major pain for 90% of the users out there - which is why 90% of the blogs out there use a standard theme that comes with the CMS.
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I think that will be the next step. CMS systems are not there yet. Although there are modules that make it extremely easy to change colors etc.
Wow, that's odd... I actually think Drupal theming *is* fairly straightforward. Especially when you make use of the PHPtheme engine instead of writing a .theme file from scratch in PHP. I just taught myself how to theme Drupal over the past weekend and although I don't consider myself a Drupal-themeing pro, I certainly was suprised to find it was much easier to do than I thought.
No matter what, you're going to need to learn XHTML and CSS if you want to seriously build a solid site design. I wouldn't trust a GUI system to do that for me, because sometimes a designer must not only design how the site looks... they must design how the code *works.* Learning XHTML/CSS is just as much a requirement of the profession, I think, as Photoshop/Illustrator is. Once you have a design layed out and themed with vanilla XHTML/CSS, all you need to do is start adding in the various PHP variables.