Customer Reviews

Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Drupal 6 Themes from Packt Press by Ric Shreves is a remarkably disappointing book.

Many authors have tackled explaining the programming and configuration of Drupal websites, but this is the first book dedicated to teaching users how to make Drupal 6 look and feel like their own.

Out of the box, Drupal is an amazing website creation package; it has features that would take years to "reinvent" if you tried to work from scratch. From a technical, back-end , programmer's point of view it inspires admiration.

When I put my artistic, designer's hat on, though, Drupal can leave me nearly in tears. Though version 6 radically simplified and improved the design process over the previous edition, learning to skin a dynamically generated Drupal site is still an order of magnitude harder than designing a static web page. Though it is possible, for example, to use Dreamweaver in parts of the Drupal design process, ultimately your snippets of code and css stylesheets are going to need to be channeled to many different locations that on the site that are not readily viewable in a WYSIWYG environment.

In other words, to effectively give a Drupal site a makeover you need to know everything you'd need to do to design a regular website, plus a wealth of information about the "how" and "where" Drupal needs you to follow to get your vision integrated into its content management system. From a technical point of view, the way Drupal gives granular control of the design process without the need to hack the core code is an engineering marvel. Harnessing that power, particularly given the state of the online documentation is challenging.

It is for that reason that, even after working with Drupal for over a year, I looked forward to Ric Shreves Drupal 6 Themes. It is also why I am so profoundly disappointed by this ill-conceived book.

When I first picked up the book there were immediate red flags. In the preface, under the heading "Who is this book for?" the short paragraph that follows doesn't answer that question directly. Is this a book for designers? For programmers? For beginners to Drupal? For intermediates? Instead, the section explains that for a designer to theme in Drupal "a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful". Frankly, most designers I know don't fit into that category and have little interest in wading through Fundamentals of PHP and MySQL, let alone PHP for Dummies. I think most of them coming to this book are looking for an author to step them through the basics of what they need to bring their vision to fruition in Drupal - even if this means spoon feeding them some basic PHP.

More intermediate users are going to want to know about how to completely revamp the look and feel of Drupal: How do you change the look and feel of the Tabs and Menu systems, for example; the interrelationship between themes, views, and CCK fields, for another. How do you integrate the color picker functions into your own themes? What is the best workflow? What advanced tools are available, and how do you use them? You're not going to find this level of advice here.

Advanced users might want to see a dissection and annotation of the more advanced themes and how they work. The forums at Drupal.org are simply filled with requests of this sort from users who tried to modify some of the included themes only to find them as difficult to navigate uncharted as the Sargasso Sea.

By failing to adequately target a typical reader of the book the author languishes without focus, specificity, or purpose. The first three chapters of the book feel more like a regurgitation of on-line documentation, without adding much new information or clarity : In general terms, how does the theme system work? How do you install a download and install a theme? How do you turn on blocks and modules?

Things begin to break down early in Chapter 3, "Working with Theme Engines". The introduction to the PHPTemplate engine is alright as far as it goes (covering ground already well tilled in virtually every other Drupal book) but it does not concisely take the lesson to the next level with explanations and examples that one would expect in a single topic volume.

Actually, despite the plurality suggested in the chapter heading ("Theme Engines"), the author focuses almost exclusively on the PHPTemplate engine, devoting only two and a half pages to alternatives. Since he gives no examples to contrast the engines and speaks only in generalities, why bother to mention them at all beyond a simple statement such as: "the consideration of alternative theme engines is beyond the scope of this book", an approach he uses elsewhere in the book.

By Chapter 4, "Identifying Templates, Stylesheets, and Themable Functions", I could feel the book go through a schizophrenic shudder, as it abruptly shifted from the "beginners guide" to advanced user's "bible". Forty-five pages are devoted to listing theme elements in Drupal, without explanation or example. At best, this material might have been useful as an appendix, but the leap from "how we turn on an theme" to "provides a div for standardizing indentation" is simply too great. Likewise, this chapter seems to be conceived alphabetically- starting with a description of the theming the "Agregator Module" (try asking most designers what the heck that is) rather than the all important Page.tpl.php file that controls nearly every page on the site. Again, it felt as if this material had been lifted from on-line faqs and documentations and inserted here without much amplification or explanation. Certainly, the tone and manner of the chapter bears nearly no relation to the preceding chapters. Much of it is written in phrases, not even sentences.

Things improve somewhat in the next two chapters. Almost without explanation the technospeak of Chapter 4 is dismissed and the author gives some specific examples of how to modify themes. There is a lot of material missing here: the relationship between Ajax and themes is the most glaring omission. It is hard to imagine a book on theming Drupal that doesn't spend time on formatting "tabs" or "menus", but Shreves avoids these topics. Likewise, there isn't an index entry for theming CCK fields, panels, or views (though they are mentioned in the appendix) - and these modules are considered by many to be nearly indispensible elements in Drupal Site building.

Another glaring omission are third party tools that purport to make theming easier for the beginner. I would include some reference to Artiseer 2, here, perhaps including one of the Artiseer themes, how it works, and how it might be modified.

An appendix to the book entitled "A Themer's Toolkit" encapsulated many of the faults of the book as a whole. Knowing about the Devel Module, for instance, is important. But, knowing how to use it is even more important. The three short paragraphs plus one "tip", barely scratch the surface. Similar, even shorter, blurbs do little more than acknowledge that other modules that would be useful to the theme developer exist. Invariably, these "descriptions" are followed by a weblink where you can learn more. For many readers, the reason we bought this book in the first place was the insufficiency of the on-line material.

So, let me save you some time and money. If you're a beginner, take a look at Using Drupal by Angela Byron, et. al. For more advanced info on Drupal 6 Themes, you can get much of the same information as covered here at the drupal handbook.

I have used Drupal to administer sites for years. It is flexible, powerful, and relatively easy to use. The one area of Drupal where I have been weak is theming. Generally, I have used contributed themes, maybe modifying colors, logos, and other simple things.

The one or two times I felt ambitious and tried to read through the documentation in order to learn how to create my own theme from scratch, I either got distracted by life, or found myself getting tired of the search and wishing I had all of the information I needed in one place to learn how to create a theme.

This book has impressed me. It is well-written, using clear language, useful diagrams and figures, and a logical progression of ideas. It starts with the basics, talking about what a theme is and defining its components. Then, it moves into the details of modifying the default themes. Up to this point, I didn't encounter anything new to me, but I was only up to chapter two.

Starting with chapter three, the book reveals and clearly describes each of the files and elements that make up a theme, using both the default PHPTemplate engine as well as other options. Later, the book teaches how to use and master this template engine to create your own custom theme, including how to create custom looks for specific pages, modules, and more.

In between the two, you learn how to download ready-made themes, contributed by the Drupal user and developer community, and modify them for personal use, knowing how and where to look for usage restrictions to avoid problems.

Finally, the book ends with some very useful appendices that show where to find every css file and what it affects, and other useful tooks and kits for developers.

This book has saved me a lot of time, and is well done. If you are responsible for a site powered by Drupal, you may find it useful as well.

Every book has a target audience - this book's is pretty narrow is scope - people that want to understand how theming drupal 6 works. Ric Shreves hits the target! I am a mid level drupalite - not a ninja programmer or designer but not a beginner either. I found it very helpful.

Theming is the "art" of making your website look exactly how you want it. This book shows you everything you need to know on the technical side of how to make that happen. The book doesn't give design help - there are other resources for that - but if you are a good web designer and want to understand how to make drupal "pretty" this book is the best resource out there. With this book and CSS and graphic design skills you can make it happen.

Certainly all of the information in the book can be found on http://drupal.org or on other related websites, but what I like about a book is that it is focused on just the topic at hand - "drupal 6 theming" and it is in a format designed to "cover all of the bases."

As I was reading it (I have read the whole book) I found things that had stumped me -- things that are not obvious and often left out of discussions on the drupal.org discussion forums(but if you search you can find the answer) -- like to use node-story.tpl.php you have to have node.tpl.php in your theme directory ... I saw this detail noted several times in the book.

Overall I highly recommend this book and another PACKT book Learning Drupal 6 Module Development together they are very good ways to improve your drupal skills.

Drupal 6 Themes does what it says: it shows you how to make themes aka templates for Drupal 6. The book cover tells you whom the tutorial is written for and warns that the student should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system.

And that's no lie. If you don't know how to add a picture to a page or story, you'll get stuck at a certain point, as this is part of one assignment, and the book doesn't give a clue. No problem with that, in principle, because you've been warned by the author, Ric Shreves.

Some basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful, according to the author. I'd say that your knowledge should be a little bit more extensive than basic, or you won't understand a lot of code on scores of pages.

Drupal 6 Themes shows how to setup and configure a theme, how to dress up Drupal's out of the box theme Garland, how to modify an existing theme and how to build one from scratch. In that respect, this book delivers what it promises. That's a plus.

A minus is the great number of errors in the book. The code for creating a new theme contains mistakes that will render blank pages. Unfortunately, the code that can be downloaded from Packtpub's website contains these same mistakes, so that's of no help.

An even bigger minus is the fact that on its own site Packtpub reports - at least up until this day - that there are no errata for this book. This reviewer has provided Packtpub with not only an errata list but also with corrected code, but weeks later the publishing house still hasn't published any of the errata on its Drupal 6 Themes support pages.

So whoever is going to buy this book has got to understand: yes, this tutorial may teach you how to theme for Drupal 6, but it'll take more puzzling than it should, and if Packtpub doesn't wake up and bring a little more service to it's pages, you're going to be out there on your own.

Less than 5 months ago I posted a review of "Drupal 5 Themes" by Ric Shreves. I was really jazzed to have our first book dedicated to theming Drupal. But I was concerned that it was trailing too far behind Drupal's release schedule. At that time, I had already launched my first Drupal 6 site and was working on my exit plan from Drupal 5 development.

5 months later, I'm still working on my exit plan from Drupal 5 and now I have a tool to help me. "Drupal 6 Themes" by Ric Shreves has moved me closer to being Drupal 5 free. On a personal note, I have vowed to start all new projects on Drupal 6 and I'm sure to reach for this book. Keep up the pace Ric, Drupal 7 is closer than you think.

So many great Drupal books have come out this year (at least in title). I have not been able to look at them all yet. The maturing of Drupal as a platform is reflected in more focused books and Drupal theming deserves some focused attention. Theming is increasingly stretching the traditional tool-kit of the designer. No longer can the designer just turn over their work to be implemented by the developer. Gone are the days when designers can remain naive to server side scripting (PHP).

Some big changes have come in Drupal 6 theming. Themes, like modules, now have .info files, allowing us to enumerate and version our themes with out having to load the entire code. Hook_theme() is our new friend, theme functions must now be registered instead of being discovered on the fly. But the most interesting change for me, is that themes can now override core- and module-defined CSS files. I can't tell you how much time I have wasted tracking that class down to some random module style sheet gone wild. A new Jquery version is nice too. Ric covers all of these new features and simplifies the basics.

I am definitely recommending this book to designers and Drupal beginners. It covers all the basics and gives you a running start at developing your first Drupal 6 theme. But I was disappointed, as in the previous book, there was no material on how to theme the most common contributed modules like CCK, Views and Panels. Drupal's true glory and power come when you successfully mashup 30+ modules on top of Drupal core. I guess we need even more focused books titles like, "Drupal 6 Views 2 Theming".

I found this book a bit disappointing. It is quite thin, the quality of the screenshots is not up to a level I expect today and the book jumps from basic configuring the Garland theme right into a full listing of all theme functions and items, which should have been an appendix.

Moreover, while the author claims that you should not touch the core-themes, the first thing he demonstrates is changing the CSS file from the Garland theme!

I do mean to finish the book completely, as the next section will (hopefully) be more project-oriented to tune the ZEN theme into a proper custom theme, which is what I need to learn next, but the first half of the book did not really win me over.

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.

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.

Unlike some reviewers here I actually began with Drupal 6, and have managed to navigate through much of the [...] pages on the topic of themes, but still felt a bit short on how to actually create a sub theme. This book provides that and much more.

Chapters 1 though 5 are what I would consider the basics of learning how to get around Drupal 6 themes. 1 to 3 cover theme elements, setup & configuration and working with theme engines. Chapter 4 moves into identification of templates, stylesheets and functions that can be individually themed, extremely useful for a highly customized 'look & feel' type of site. It was almost like reading an appendix but in the middle of the book.

Chapter 5, Intercepts and Overrides I paid careful attention to as I see myself using this at some point in the near future with our current site. Chapter 6 Modifying an Existing Theme and 7 Building a New Theme was why I wanted this book in the first place, all the rest was gravy. We have a site based on Zen Classic and I struggled with how to go about creating a new sub theme, but based on Zen. This book and specifically these two chapters nailed it for me and I now feel confident enough to eventually not only modify our existing theme but create new ones too.

Chapter 9, Dealing with Forms I will no doubt be returning to also, but it is strictly about theming forms, not creating custom ones, so not at the top of my list at the moment.

And finally Appendix A, Drupal CSS Map, and exactly what it says. Both a guide to Drupal stylesheets and also the stylesheets of the default Drupal themes. The page layout was excellent and shows the exact hierarchy of each stylesheet. The only thing better would have been a pull-out poster having all of them available on one page to pin up, something I may create on my own using Visio. The last Appendix B was so-so for me as I already had various themer's related modules, CCK, Views, etc. and tools for Firefox setup and in use.

If you want to get up to speed quickly on Drupal 6 theming this is certainly a book to take a look at for your Drupal 6 site development library.

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.