[themes] Workflow Question

[Laura]

Something others have not said, but is extremely important: Do not  
modify a theme you download. Make your theme a sub-theme of the base  
theme you select, and then just override what you want. More info on  
that is here: http://drupal.org/node/225125

Zen is a popular choice for base theme. I use Studio theme, which is  
similar (the themes' respective maintainers, John Albin and Al  
Steffen, have collaborated on and shared many ideas) but with  
differences, too. You may find one or the other to be more to your  
liking or needs for a particular design.

If you're working in Drupal 7, you will find the Stark theme in Drupal  
core, which is there to be used as a base theme.

By using a base theme, you can pretty much avoid the PHP coding  
challenges, at least for the most part. Let the base theme handle  
those things. You can focus on your CSS ... and take on markup only  
when you need to override something the base theme is doing.

I would not recommend starting from scratch if you are new to Drupal.  
The PHP functions are many, and if you don't follow best practices you  
could end up opening up security vulnerabilities.

Do, however, read up on the theme structures. You will want to pay  
particular attention to regions.

Regarding layout, there are several ways to go. Drupal core provides  
some control with blocks administration. You could also look at the  
Panels module for doing page content and blocks layout in one place. I  
would recommend a serious look at Context module, though. You might  
find it more intuitive for creating conditions for different layouts.

Laura


On Oct 24, 2009, at Sat 10/24/09 8:04am, Tony Crockford wrote:

> I'm new to Drupal Theming, but have solid experience in PSD to HTML/
> CSS  template creation, in other words I can build the HTML and CSS
> for a visual, efficiently and quickly.
>
> So my question is is it easier to adapt the Zen theme to a visual
> design, or is it easier to convert a set of HTML and CSS to a Drupal
> theme?
>
> or am I asking the wrong question?
>
>
> What do you do?
>
> TIA
>
>
>
>
>
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