Drupal 5 Themes

Description

This book is the ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 5. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal website, this book is for you. Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. Included is a complete guide to the various style sheets and themeable functions in Drupal 5, making this book a valuable resource to even experienced theme developers.

Summary: Drupal 5 Themes Fills a Need
Rating: 5

I'm extremely impressed with Drupal 5 Themes. I received this book just after finishing coding three custom themes for clients - so Drupal themeing was definitely on my brain! The book is written for non-technical designers, not programmers. However, experienced programmers could find real value in this book - particularly if the programmers are new to Drupal. This book has some of the clearest, easiest to understand explanations of Drupal. If you spent much time reading the Drupal documentation, you will really appreciate the author's writing style. I'll be teaching Drupal soon, and I'm considering using this book as part of the course.

I like the structure of the book. After providing an excellent overview of Drupal, the first major exercise is modifying an existing Drupal theme. That is how most people start off learning how to theme anyway, but with this guide they should have a much better idea of what they are doing than most beginning theme designers. The second major assignment is for the programmer to design a theme from scratch. After completing both of these assignments, the reader should have tremendous confidence that they will be able to design a theme.

I wish the author had written about CCK and views moduales. They are important to many sites, and his writing style would have been a welcome addition to the documentation.


Summary: For anyone who already has some experience with Drupal and wants to build his or her own theme, this book is a must-have.
Rating: 4

In Drupal, Theming is so much more then changing some colors. Its all about customising your site. Therefore the subject is so broad that it needs its own book. Ric Shreves wrote the very first, and as far as I know, only book about theming: Drupal 5 Themes. Eventhough several Drupal development books touch the surface of theming, none manage take you from the very basics of Theming, up to the subject of building your own templating engine and customising forms. A well balanced book, for both newcomers to Drupal as well as hardened developers whom want to learn more on designing their site.

It requires great skill to make The Beautiful Photoshopped Designers mock-up into a real Drupal Site. Drupal 5 Themes helps you on your way to do that. It starts off for those without any Drupal experience, by explaining how to download and install Drupal. It even mentions how to build your development server, but if you are entirely new, getting the required webserver with PHP running, other resources, or some help is needed.
Still, even for those without any Drupal experience, the book is of great value. It focuses on the theming part, so if you are new to Drupal and will your entire site with it, you will need resources beyond this book. Resources which, for example, help you decide on how to configure your site, what modules to install, and so forth. Theming is only a part of the whole process to get your very own Drupal site online.

By starting off with a good explanation of all the terms used in Drupal theming, Shreves made this book very helpfull. Even for the skilled PHP, HTML and/or CSS developers, it is very hard to find the way around in Drupal Theming. Without knowing the terms and being able to fit them in the bigger picture, theming remains extremely hard. Drupal 5 Theming does a really good job in uncluttering all that. It explains very clear how the principle of the whole theming in Drupal works. Drupals theming is very flexible, but that comes with the price of complexity. A total of three chapters are devoted to explanation of the whole concept of theming in Drupal. From how the CSS system works, via the idea of Theming engines, to a very clear explanation of the override system that Drupal uses.

On that subject, Shreves made a good choice to not start headfirst with an entirely new design and theme, but he rather take the often followed path of adjusting an existing theme. Drupal comes with many free themes which often meet peoples needs almost. Only minor adjustments might be needed. An entire chapter is devoted to how one can adjust such an existing theme.

Being a designer, Shreves has a good view on the way Designers often look at Drupal. He uses screenshots and diagrams to explain the structure and architecture of Drupals theme layer, but also to explain his choices. One or two screenshots were rather hard to read, though. From my five years of Drupal development experience, he is very right when he not only uses technically perfect solutions, but rather touches all possible solutions with explanation of their pros and con's.
Still, it feels not right that he puts forward the solution of modifying the basis of Drupal (often referred to as "Core"). Eventhough he warns the reader that that route is dangerous, I would have preferred to see that as the one option that should never be followed. As will anyone within Drupal tell you it is. Besides this, I found nothing incorrect or wrongly phrased items.

The author clearly read the technical documentation as well as the code very well. He included parts of that documentation, as reference, but in such a matter that it is nearly useless: Including functions and their explanation is nice, but only if the parameters passed to- and variables passed from-, these functions are explained as well. As it is now, one still needs the online documentation anyway.

Furthermore, I missed a very important part in theming: Search Engine Optimalisation (SEO). In Drupal, or any website, you can achieve a lot of SEO by creating properly formed, accessible XHTML. By skipping this subject entirely, the book leaves a very important part of theming untouched.

For the more experienced developers, the book has a chapter on how to build a theme from scratch: start with nothing and make that into your own theme and site. For larger, or more demanding sites that is often the way one needs to go, so it is a very valuable subject. Though, how the author thinks I will copy three pages of source-code from the book, is beyond me. Besides two of such way too large code samples, the included samples are very well chosen and well explained. Also, Shreves did a good job on finding the most useful online Drupal handbook pages, for more in-depth reading on the subjects he explains.

Last, the really difficult subject of overriding forms is touched. It is often said that this is the hardest part in Drupal. Even so, the author manages to explain this matter in clear, understandable language, which makes this book very valuable even for skilled themers.

For anyone who already has some experience with Drupal and wants to build his or her own theme, this book is a must-have. For those new to Drupal, it is really helpful to get going and get a cutomised Drupal site online. By covering all aspects of Theming, Drupal 5 Themes makes very complete reference for Drupal developers.


Summary: A great place to start
Rating: 4

As a front-end designer, making sense of the seemingly baroque method of Drupal theming was beginning to look like a hopeless task. I had done some previous research but I kept being met with vague answers like, "well, in Drupal you could do it that way, however, you could also do it like this or this or this..."

So when I started reading "Drupal 5 Themes," I was relieved to finally see Drupal theming presented in a way that I (a non-programmer) could grasp. Although at times tedious or redundant, the step by step approach to modifying and then creating a new theme finally started turning on the lightbulbs for me. Shreve's approach instilled proper principles without becoming preachy, such as "don't edit core" and how to handle naming conventions.

I found chapter four's list of theme functions and chapter seven's list of theme variables to be an especially handy reference.

There were of course a few parts of this book that could have been more clear. The chapter on forms provides too many solutions without enough explanation of the overall forms system. The method of intercepting and creating variables could have been explained more thoroughly as well.

Overall, reading this book demystified Drupal theming and got me excited about jumping in and making my own themes.


Summary: A good introduction, but poorly structured and printed
Rating: 3

Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel.

Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS' core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new `regions' (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine).

For the most part the content is straightforward, and the reader should quickly get a feel for the naming conventions that drive the PHPTemplate approach. While not much programming knowledge is needed, it would be helpful for the reader to have a basic grasp of PHP and introductory programming constructs such as loops and conditionals. I was also surprised to find recommendations to name functions phptemplate_* within theme-specific template.php files, where they could instead be prefixed with the theme's name rather than `phptemplate'. PHP's not fond of functions that share names within the same context, and it is best to give those functions the most specific name available to you in order to avoid errors.

Given the fact that only HTML and CSS are listed as pre-requisites I was a little surprised that the PHP code wasn't introduced in a more focussed section. Given its simplicity it's to be hoped that anyone intending to spend much time building drupal sites would be able to figure it out, but while time is spent picking apart example code little time is spent actually giving a conceptual introduction or, for that matter, on explaining how to install drupal in the first place. Surprisingly, space was given to explaining how cascades work in CSS, which you would think is a fundamental part of a knowledge of CSS and unnecessary in this context.

This is the second book in a row that Packt has sent me for review where it has seemed that reference material is scattered too freely amongst the tutorial-style chapters. Significant chunks of space are given over to listing off functions, the locations of stylesheets, and so on, which is useful information but breaks up the flow of the book unhelpfully. It's surprising that that content wasn't moved to an appendix or, as with their jQuery books, a separate volume. Sitting in the middle of the book it feels like unnecessary filler (just one or two examples would do, along with a reference to an appendix, other volume, or online source) and the space could helpfully be given to more detailed tutorial material. That coupled with poor print quality and light paper stock (both also an issue with that previous book) gives the book a lightweight feel and reinforce its weaknesses.

This book should get an HTML/CSS developer who's not afraid to dip their toes into some PHP up to speed with customising a drupal site, and its worth considering if you've been mostly building static sites or customising wordpress and need a content management system with a wider range of features. Unfortunately it's still fairly weak structurally, and you may well find yourself needing to combine it with quite a bit of online documentation to properly cover the topics under discussion.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.


Summary: [relatively] easy to put together a website
Rating: 4

Drupal is a popular instance of a Content Management System (CMS). Taking the idea of Cascading Style Sheets to a much more indepth instantiation. The book starts from scratch, assuming no prior experience by the reader with Drupal. The default installation comes with a set of templates, called themes within the Drupal context. Each theme includes both a look and feel and an accompanying functionality. Arguably, it is the combination of these that sets Drupal apart from a simple, first generation collection of look and feel templates.

An example of functionality is being able to have a blog or forums on your website. Nowadays seemingly ubiquitous on so many personal websites, and corporate ones at that. Another example is the aggregation of third party RSS feeds and the display of these. A point of Drupal is that nowadays, there is little value added in recoding functionalities like these from scratch. Drupal gives you commonalities that are now commodity features.

But equally germane to some readers is how Drupal manages to largely separate the UI designer aspects from the programming. So that different people, with different but complementary skill sets can jointly put together a website.

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