I have been playing with Drupal since last few weeks and most of my play has been regarding manipulating the theme of Drupal. I have accumulates certain tidbits or some piece of information in my experiements with theming Drupal which I would like to share. Since I have used Drupal more as an user rather than a coder, so you might be interested in what a relatively noob has noticed. Let me tell you that I have had my experiements on Drupal 6 before you start yelling my name in vain.
The most important thing which I believe wouldn’t be new for many of you is that CSS should be used for the main layout. It’s not a rocket science because CSS has much more benefits than HTML which makes edits and other stuff quite easy. Other thing which might be causing some problem or worse hair loss to some of you is that some of the ares are not visible in the dev mode. In spite of your perceptions and imaginations those areas are not hidden but just blocked because as you might not have the permission to enter there. Other thing that needs to be taken care of while building or manipulating a theme is that you must keep “drupal’s caching” disabled. It can be done by following the path Admin->Site Configuration->Performance, disable caching, and then clicking on the ‘clear cache’ button.
You must not hard code as well and it is much better to use the ‘base_path()’ and ‘path_to_theme()’ functions in page.tpl.php so that if you decide to base another theme off of this one by making a copy of the theme directory, it’ll ‘just work’, instead of having to go through and change every reference to every ‘img src’ in all the files.It would be really great if you read some material on theming Drupal which can give some theoretical idea about it. The CSS reference at W3Schools is an excellent resource to keep refreshing your CSS knowledge and learn new things.
Just a short piece of information which might interest you.
very interested about this:
“You must not hard code as well and it is much better to use the ‘base_path()’ and ‘path_to_theme()’ functions in page.tpl.php”
could you please write more about this?
I am having a hard time making my site into a site like the onion or vday or http://www.look.co.uk/. I only have the basics on my site, and haven’t found out how to get past the Default look and feel and functionality. I can’t even post an article with a picture in the paragraph. Simple stuff. Make a contact form. Make an about us page. Make a products page. make a services page with a list of services I offer to be able to get a quote on a service from me. I am a Graphic Designer, and to be able to design and look at the effects online would be fantastic. I really am pushing for photoshop CS5. any tips?