Maybe I will get that book, then. Everyone recommends it, but I had the impression that it was only for people who want to really develop stuff, like actual modules.
And I have to say, having read just a couple of tech how-to books, I don't know how people can stand it - good writers seem to be in very short supply in the tech handbook genre.
Jean
On 8/15/07, sander-martijn sander@sander-martijn.com wrote:
Well I can give you an answer from someone who knows css html and php quite well and has been doing all of them for a decade, give or take. Theming in and of itself is not that difficult. However it will certainly seem so from the online documentation. I beat my head on the wall yesterday for hours while reading through page after page of documentation and not even understanding where to start - The html, css and javascript being done and a solid knowledge of php, all i had to know was what I needed to add to the code, how and where and I could handle the rest. The documentation seems to be bent on the idea that everyone wants to modify an existing theme (and a browse through the theme repository shows that that's exactly what many do) rather than implement a custom design delivered by a designer. Furthermore most of it speaks in drupal. Lastly, a lot of things are simply not documented or missing important details.
I finally gave up on the documentation and went to b&n and picked up a copy of Pro Drupal Development. Within an hour I had a theme working that somewhat resembles the site and have a good idea of what I need to do for the rest. I'm now hacking through the menu structure to get my css dropdown menus working.
In short, it's not theming that's difficult, it's finding good information on it that is.
.sander
Jean Gazis wrote:
How hard is it for a non-programmer to learn just enough PHP to do theming, or is that in itself a stupid question? Compared to say, learning CSS. (I mean not learning PHP instead of CSS, but I have been learning CSS so it is a reasonable benchmark.)
Jean
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