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Well, it would be if we had time to blog.
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Themeing Drupal
As a relative newcomer to Drupal handicapped by a total and consuming desire not to write code, I find myself spending a lot of time in the documentation. One of Drupal’s biggest selling points was the nature and size of the community.
A meritocracy, the Drupal community rewards those who contribute by writing code, providing support and helping with documentation. This leads to a wealth of information provided by experts available, for free, right there in my browser. The depth of the documentation is remarkable and rarely do I run into a question or run or issue that somebody hasn’t thought of first.
Finding the needle is pretty easy, once you have the right haystack and this is where Theming Drupal comes in. Theming Drupal, by Emma Jane Hogbin provides a clear path for those from an HTML/CSS design background into the Drupal theming system.
The book begins at the beginning, with the creation of a new theme and the corresponding .info file. This file is where the various theme identifiers (name, description, engine, etc.) and page regions are defined. Theming Drupal then moves on into using template variables in your HTML to create page template files. There are a lot of template variables and this is where, by providing a coherent overview, Theming Drupal shines. Special attention is paid to theming both node templates — in Drupal a node is basically a chunk of content and can be an image, an article, a comment, a link, darn near anything — and customizing the appearance of blocks.
Ms. Hogbin suggests using a starter them and provides a list of starter themes along with more extensive discussion on the popular Zen and the grid-based 960.gs themes. For this newbie a starter theme was mandatory, I found that there was just too much I was overlooking in my early attempts. Theming Drupal helped me understand the work of others so that I can — thanks to Drupal’s open source license — make it my own.
Themeing Drupal got me to more than one of those Aha! moments where something just clicks and that is the highest praise I can give a book.