In Detail Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.
Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system's front and back-end interfaces.
Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website.
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. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.
What you will learn from this book? Learn about the Drupal 6 Theming Architecture Find and install new themes Get the most from Drupal's theme configuration system Create a new theme from scratch Master PHPTemplate Modify the default templates and styles Override the default templates with your own Create dynamic styling which responds to the content or the user Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient
Approach
This book helps you understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.
Who this book is written for?
The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity - you don't need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system.
Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.
Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way.
User review
Nice comprehensive reference on Drupal theming
This book provides a comprehensive overview of Drupal themes. While it does work as a good reference in case you want to go back and look up something, I cannot say for sure it has a nice flow built into it or was that much fun to read. It did seem a bit repetitive. However, if you are interested in knowing how theming works in Drupal, this book does the job of covering it in detail.
User review
Didn't contain information not found on the online documentation
I have been learning Drupal on my own for the last three months or so. I picked up this book because I wanted to learn how to theme custom menus so that my themes could have buttons. I figured a 300+ page book just about theming would have at least some information on how to theme your menu since I couldn't seem to find that information online anywhere. I was wrong. The author skims over the subject completely and seems to just be regurgitating all the information that is already available on the [,,.] website (which isn't very extensive at all). I swear I read parts where it almost seems copy and pasted from the online documentation.
In addition, the author spends 45 pages listing off possible candidate php files to make changes to how certain things are displayed, but doesn't give any explanation on how to take advantage of that information. It feels to me like he was just trying to take this book beyond 300 pages and threw that in at the last minute.
Overall, I was very disappointed by this book. Everything I learned could have been covered in 20 pages. I wish there were better alternative books on the market. The first couple of chapters may be useful for a total beginner who just wants to learn how the Drupal 6 theming system works. For anyone that already gets how a theme works, and wants to take the next step to creating real professional themes, this book is useless.
User review
Excellent for beginners
Un excelent book for beginners in Drupal's Themes customization and no english speakers. Excellent writing, excellents explanations, very basic english, is fantastic!
User review
Good Introduction to Theming in Drupal 6
Over the past year and a half I've been doing quite a bit of work with Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System (CMS). Whenever I'm asked how I'm finding Drupal, my answer is usually that, `I have a love hate relationship with it.` There is no doubt that Drupal is a very powerful and flexible CMS and more and more companies, universities, communities and individuals are using it. If you don't believe me just look through the various Case Studies and also the list of Drupal sites posted by Drupal's creator and project lead, Dries Buytaert. Most of my frustrations came from the fact that I'm used to having complete control over the markup behind the sites I build. At first I found this not to be the case with Drupal, but as I began to work more and more with it and learn the ins and outs, I started to see how to regain that control.
Enter Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves. This book opened my eyes to some things that I didn't know or understand about theming Drupal. While this book is geared towards Drupal 6, there were quite a few things I was able to learn and apply to Drupal 5 which is the version of Drupal that we are currently using at work (The other option of course would be to buy Drupal 5 themes by the same Author and Publisher). As the book rightly says `Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6.`
The 1st few chapters (1-3) discuss the basics of Drupal theming. I felt these chapters weren't really for me since I was already familiar with the basics. However, it will be very good for person's not familiar with Drupal theming at all. It describes what a theme is, how to add new themes and how to configure those themes. Theme engines are also discussed. Drupal is capable of using a variety of theming engines to build sites, such as Smarty, PHPTal and XTemplate. However, Drupal is distributed with PHPTemplate which relies on good old PHP and which many PHP developers are already familiar with.
Chapters 4-5 then delve into template files, themable functions and how to intercept and override them. This is where you begin to regain control over the markup output by Drupal and it's modules and are able to customize it the way you want it. One of the nice things about Drupal is that there are certain themable functions in the core and in contributed modules that follow a naming convention (ie. `theme_function_name'), which makes it easy for you to identify and override the functionality and output from it's original format. The principles of naming conventions applies to overriding templates as well. For instance one of the template files that is essential to every Drupal theme is the page.tpl.php file. This controls the general layout of the site and does most of the heavy lifting. You could for instance override this and have a different look for your user pages by simply creating a new file called page-user.tpl.php and making adjustments as necessary. You can do a whole lot more, but I'll let you read the book to find out all the juicy details.
Chapter 6, shows you to modify an existing theme, the Zen theme, which prides itself on being flexible and one of the better themes to start with when learning how to create themes in Drupal. Chapters 7-8 continue to build upon and tie everything together. Ric shows you how to create a theme from scratch and have multiple page templates. You will also learn how to control how your theme is displayed based on the type of content, the user viewing it and other factors. Lastly, chapter 9 demonstrates how to theme the various forms generated by the Drupal core. A form I found myself wanting to customize recently was the User Login Block, luckily for me, this was covered in the book and I learnt the different approaches to modifying this and other forms within Drupal.
With all that said, if you're new to theming in Drupal, I definitely recommend this book. Ric did a good job of giving a solid foundation and covering most of what you need to know to comfortably create themes in Drupal.
User review
Great coverage of Drupal Themes
I have read most of the book and it is easy to read. The first few chapters are a good review of Drupal and how it works, for me Chapter 6 is where the meat of the book begins.
I would recommend this to anyone wanting to understand more about Drupal theming.
