I'm interested in creating a custom theme for a Drupal site I'm working on. I am new to Drupal, however I have a decent bit of experience in working with the underlying concepts that it seems are needed to build a theme (CSS, PHP, HTML).
So, my question is - where do I start? Is there a canonical guide to creating Drupal themes? Resources that I should be aware of (other than the Theming Guide)? Gotchas that others have encountered, or just general words of wisdom from those who are more experienced?
Can I recommend you install the DEVEL module
http://drupal.org/project/devel
It can give you some really insightful clues how your page is being put together.
It also comes with a really useful feature called DRUAPL THEMER INFORMATION, which when activated lets you click on parts of your page, and tells you what bits of code did what.
My second tip is try and create your own node type templates, and then find out how the node data works.
For example in the theme folder create a new file called node-story.tpl.php
<?php
print "<textarea cols=100 rows=30>". print_r($node,true) ."</textarea>";
# or krumo($node); # if you have krumo installed
print "<h1>". $node->title ."</h1>";
print "<p>" . formdat_date($node->created,"custom", "d/m/Y) ."</p>" ;
?>
Start with a starter theme and then build you own on top it. Here's a comparison table of different starter themes.
Update: There's also a starter theme review with screenshots, where the author explains them:
Starter or "base" themes are a class
of themes that seek to provide
best-practices starting points for
themers to build unique designs. Most
include a common set of features
necessary for most sites, helping to
minimize the repetition of a themer
recreating many similar files, markup
and code for each project.
The best way to do it is to start with a theme, and modify it bit by bit. That's how most of the people whom I know do it. You take the themes/garland directory and copy it to sites/all/themes/garland-modified, then you change a few things in it to reflect the new change (in principle you rename the .info file to the new directory location and you edit it to change garland to your new directory), then you go bit by bit and change things in the files to reflect your design.
This may seem tedious and a waste of time (why not just start from scratch?) but you have several advantages:
you start with a working theme
you start with a complete theme, wich everything you may want
you don't risk of forgetting pieces which are required to have a working site
There are starter kits which are supposed to make things easier (see the zen theme for example) which you basically edit in a similar way I outlined above. But I found them a bit harder to understand...
Good luck with Drupal theming :)
There is a learning curve, but I would recommend you start with the Zen Theme which has a theme starter kit included. Purchase the Drupal 6 Themes Book, Using Drupal Book and Front End Drupal and it should get you going in the right direction.
I've been learning it for almost 5 months now (coming from the Joomla world) and I have found it helpful to get to know the Drupal system by actually working with the examples from Using Drupal and the Front End Drupal Book. It really got me up to speed on how the system works, from installing modules, to configuring modules and setting up permissions and all the how to's for creating themes.
Learning how to setup a Drupal site is pertinent to building and deploying sites with Drupal as well as theming sites because the contributed modules as well as the core ones have to be over written with your own styles. Most people come into Drupal thinking that Drupal Themers are Designers but they are not. Most of them are programmers with little or no design experience and have someone else hand a pre-made design to them and then they take it integrate with Drupal. You will have to have, xhtml, css and some php experience to theme for Drupal. I hope this helps.
Here's a really top notch tutorial
http://acquia.com/community/resources/acquia-tv/tips-and-tricks-drupal-theming-90-minute-tutorial
zen as a starter theme and use the module that lets you mouseover your page and suggests page template names for those elements you want to theme. forgot the name of the module but it really kick started things for me. its not that straightforward otherwise. good luck
Related
So we got a great project and we absolutely have to learn Typo3 or Drupal for it quickly. I already know some basic things.
I did the installation correctly for both, I know how to set up a basic Site using Fluid Template in Typo3 and I know how to set up a basic template in drupal without any styles.
My Problem now is how do I style a website since typo3 or drupal doesn't have a field for classes (The fields just get some random ids) and also how can I build a website with multiple sections where I have to style each section individually.
If you have any links to good tutorials or anything else that explains what I need to know I would appreciate it.
First of all, i think you understand HTML/CSS and know that TYPO3,... are content management systems. They're wrapping your content (saved to the database) with a template like HTML Files to send the result to the browser as a full rendered website.
ThomasLöffler already gave you the hint to read the documentation on both websites to make your choice which one you want to use. I prefer TYPO3, but the start many years ago wasn't easy. So i could you explain a little bit, and on a very short way what you need to do... After all please read the docs on typo3.org (Gettin started guide or something)
In TYPO3 you need to include and build your HTML Template. Prefered with the FLUID Template Engine / Framework. After that you need to set it with the TYPO3 TypoScript as your main template.
The content templates like will be rendered by the TYPO3 Extension "fluid_styled_content". This extension has also fluid templates to render the content object into a html output. Before you have enough knowledge about typo3 it's not recomended to change them.
The main thing is, that you need to include a stylesheet (css) file in your site. In TYPO3's TypoScript it's for example like this:
page.includeCSS.file100 = path/to/your/css/mystyle.css
Thats the very short overview and very little explanation what to do. But as Thomas said, you need to understand both and decide for one of them. And of course you need to read the docs first a little bit, before you ask. That would help you and each of us, to give you better answers. Good luck!
TYPO3 Gett started:
https://docs.typo3.org/typo3cms/GettingStartedTutorial/Introduction/Index.html
You can learn a lot of things if you take a look into the code of the official introduction package (https://extensions.typo3.org/extension/introduction/) The package can simply installed over the extension manager -> get preconfigured distributions
Or you just use it as a basis to build your own layout. You do not have to reinvent the wheel ;)
Ive been using wordpress for awhile now and wanted to try something different. Enter in my discovery of the world of static website generates. Now I have my eyes on Octopress which I know to be built on jekyll. Before I start getting dirty in ruby I want to know if its relatively possible to translate my current wordpress theme to a static site.
That's exactly what I did recently:
http://eduncan911.com/blog
I copied a friend's Wordpress theme (with permission) of almost the same design:
http://forgetfoo.com
"I want to know if its relatively possible"
To answer your first concern, the answer is a big ol' YES. That's what make Jekyll so good for these kind of things: it's just raw HTML and css and js in a few directories. Place them anywhere you like, and start cutting away at chunks in includes, wrap some plugins, etc and before you know it, you are rake generate and rake deploy.
Octopress makes it even sweeter by having a large number of plugins, a blog-like template system already structured*** (see below), and bunch of defaults all setup for blogging.
The issue with Octopress' theme is as I said above, it is purely setup as a blogging platform. You'd need to highly modify, or in my case just completely ignore, the template they have and just piggy back on the nice Github Pages, SCSS, and plugins it comes with and roll your own html templates. It's really really really easy.
Where do you start?
/source/index.html
You start here with this YAML file. At the top is a definition of layout, which is used to pick what "wrapper" or layout you want to surround this index.html content with. To make a new template, one like yours, I'd call it layout: fuse_homepage. Then go into source/_layouts/ and create a new `fuse_homepage.html'.
Start with your own theme and format as you want
But see, you don't even have to do that. Hell, just paste your entire homepage HTML right
into that source/index.html to start with (make sure to keep the --- YAML markers at the top, but get rid of the layout). Start there and break things out later when you get tired of coping and pasting the header/footers. Heck, just start there - make a fuse_header.html and fuse_footer.html and just share those for now.
Ignore Octopress' theme layout - it's just for hackers that don't do UX and just want to tweak things. Designers or people that like to control their code will want to roll your own.
It really is that flexible. However you want to break it up, you can. Want a new page, just call rake new_page["title"], which all this does is create either an /title.html, or /title/index.html, depending on your settings in the config file. But see, you don't even have to do that. Just create the file yourself - BAM, it is copied on deployment.
Regrets with Octopress
Trying to force the themes to do my bidding, chasing rabbits
I only regret trying to follow the Octopress' author's format - wasted so much time and got so turned off at Octopress. In the end, I just ignored it and did my own. Much easier, and I know where everything is. I also wanted nice and cleanly formatted HTML - a show that I care about my code. The default Octorpess theme and structure invites so many mis-placed tabs and spaces that it's just ugly. Doing your own, you are in full control, space by little space insert.
Importing posts
There's a huge amount of Google links to help you export your WRX from Wordpress, and to generate a the post files automagically. Be prepared to try several different ones as they aren't all perfect.
import comments into Disqus
Unless you are already using Disqus on Wordpress, you are going to have a horrible time with this one.
I can now claim myself to be an WRX/BlogML expert after my nearly 100 tries of importing and exporting and fixing and so on. There is no documentation on either importer (Disqus nor Wordpress) to tell you of the individual required fields. For example, Wordpress requires wp:comment_id to be set, and unique for each and every post you import whereas Disqus requires an wp:comment_email field, even though say it is optional (it's BS, argh).
Be prepared to hack code. It is a hacker's framework after all
Do note though: it is a lot of work to hack around the static site. Doing your own template will save you so much time. You'll also may want to write your own custom plugins, which I did, to get around the bugs in peoples github repos - it's pretty easy, but does require coding.
I spent about a month off and on until I got my new blog/static site to where I liked it for launch. A lot more than I wanted, but it was "fun" learning new languages (Ruby, Python, installed Debian linux in a VM cause Windows just sucks at that stuff).
If you aren't prepared to write that much, there are a couple more static site generators out there as I blogged about (hey, got to show off my Octopress and custom theme!):
http://eduncan911.com/software/the-static-blog-boom.html
Btw, nice site...
I am a beginner with Magento trying to build a simple custom theme and while I have done a fair bit of research I am really in need of some simple clarifications because I think that the learning curve is rather steep but worth it once some basic concepts are understood. My design goals are very basic: All products listed on the homepage with different image sizes, floating left.
What I've done is downloaded the 'Modern' theme as a base to work with and renamed it:
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme
skin/frontend/default/mytheme
I've done some basic tweaking to the phtml files in
app/design/frontend/default/mytheme/template/
However, I have a number of questions:
Where exactly is the template for the homepage? Is it only customizable using the CMS>Pages control in the backend under Design>Page Layout? This confuses me because I am used to developing in wordpress and creating a custom php file for the index/homepage. I really think this separation of html/xml is really the hard thing for me to grasp.
If i can only customize the homepage using the backend, I see the block: <block type="catalog/product_new" name="home.catalog.product.new" alias="product_new" template="catalog/product/new.phtml" after="cms_page">. Navigating to mytheme directory, I don't see anything referring to this. Where are these things located? Am I supposed to copy any file missing from mytheme from the base?
Is it only possible to have 1 column, 2 column, 3 column etc. layouts?
An endless thanks to anyone who can steer me in the right direction. I really think it is just a matter of understanding very important fundamentals of how Magento themes are structured. At the moment I am already finding it so frustrating having my finder window open 7 folders deep and having to move around constantly. How I miss the simplicity of Wordpress' single folder themes.
Thank you!!
I suggest you to read all things in http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base before you go further
homepage content can be anything you want and you can reference it to be anything with layout file descriptors
MVC concept tells that it is taken from catalog/product_new block and from whatever is set to it's template. In current case catalog/product/new.phtml is used and you can edit this
you can have a completely custom setup and not restricted to anything that default contains. However it is wise to use defaults as almost all extensions depend on defaults more or less.
A very big part of magento design is layouts.
whether you choose to use a local.xml or change files from layouts folder you must have an ideea on how they work.
Here is a link for start
Intro to Layouts
There are many others resources outhere ofcourse.
I have recently finished up learning PHP/MySQL,css3,xhtml and Photoshop.And now i want to create themes for WordPress.So please suggest me some ideas...
I would start by downloading some of the popular themes, (such as cutline) and looking through the source.
It's essential to understand the loop, the template hierarchy, and the widget system.
Keep the template tags and function reference docs handy (there's a function for most things you could want to do).
I suggest you to read Digging into wordpress by Chris Coyer and Jeff Star.
It's a great guide for learning wordpress and it also provides a great section dedicated to wordpress theming.
I'm new to Drupal, and frankly after reading through the Drupal documentation, their guide to themeing isn't all that helpful. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding, but it seems like there are certain variables you always have access to and different functions you can define to override or implement behavior.
Long story short, I'd like to be able to trace through the Drual themeing code to understand hwo it works. Doesn't seem like it should be all that difficult, but I'm having a hard time finding a good reference. Anyone know of one?
http://www.nerdliness.com/article/2007/09/10/drupal-theming
There are a few different resources you can use that might help out:
You can use the irc channel on freenode: #drupal-themes
A module that I hear a lot of themers like is the Devel module - http://drupal.org/project/devel. This is what will allow you to trace through the code and see what variables, function calls, etc. are being used.
You might also want to check out the Druapl 6 Themes book
I'd recommend Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting over the Drupal 6 Themes book. I put together a Drupal 6 Theming Cheat Sheet that includes links to the resources I've found most helpful.
Honestly, though there are good links and books to learn from, the way I've learned quickest was to start creating a theme. Create your theme.info file, then begin converting an index.html to page.tpl.php or page-front.tpl.php using the snippets in the cheat sheet or the nerliness.com link mentioned in Robert Harvey's answer. Those two files constitute a bare-bones theme.
From there, you can override additional template files as needed. You can use the Theme developer to find just what templates to override, to customize a particular part of the site. Remember to clear the theme cache, as you add new template files.
Also, make sure your theme has the base template of any file you want to override. See the "Note: There is a bug which prevents derivative template files from being detected..." section of the Core templates and suggestions page, for more details.