On Sunday 25 October 2009 5:14:06 am Mark Shropshire wrote:
Thanks to the original poster for bringing up this issue. It has been great to see some different approaches for theming in Drupal.
Zirafa,
I definitely agree with your last statement that there is no real "right" way for theming. I think there are best practices and we have seen a few of those in this email thread. I have to admit that I have actually done the same thing with downloading foundation and renaming the theme folder.
Thanks, Mark
There is no one right way, but there certainly are wrong ways. :-) Large gobs of PHP logic in your template files is a Wrong Way(tm), regardless of whether you're using a base-theme approach or a from-scratch approach. (That's what preprocess functions are for.) And if you put SQL in a template file I will hit you. :-)
Also remember that the HTML Drupal spits out to you by default is already very extensive and complete, and more importantly is dynamic. As your site evolves, the structure of the HTML will change, too. Not page.tpl.php, necessarily, but what CCK fields you have will change over time, what Views you have will change over time, blocks will get added and shift around, etc.
I highly recommend the "sustainable theming" blog series by Colleen Carroll[1]. It discusses the practical benefits of "trusting Drupal" and going "with the grain" of the CMS in your theming just as you should in your code. There are cases where you don't need or or shouldn't, but in the long run you'll save yourself time by leveraging what Drupal already gives you as much as possible.
[1] http://www.palantir.net/blog/colleen-carroll
Specifically (I need to yell at our site admin to shorten URLs...): http://www.palantir.net/blog/sustainable-markup-how-be-a-themer-drupal http://www.palantir.net/blog/graycor-drupal-theming-works http://www.palantir.net/blog/drupal-theming-getting-your-hands-dirty-and- building-house http://www.palantir.net/blog/drupal-theming-applying-sustainable-method-view...