theme
Part 4 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.
Well, after having a successful launch day, ironing out a few small bugs in the CSS of the layout, and patting myself on the back, I decided to push the initial release of the 'Airy Blue' theme created for Open Source Catholic out to Drupal's Theme repository. It turns out working with CVS isn't the hell-on-earth I thought it would be, but it's still a heckuva lot to expect from a guy who logs less than an hour a day in a command-line interface!
I applied for a CVS account, then read through the plentitude of CVS documentation for themers on drupal.org, making a few notes here and there. After having my CVS account approved, I finally had some time to fire up Terminal, and go through the process of first 'checking in' to CVS, then uploading my theme directory, and finally 'committing' and 'tagging' it for release on my project page.
>> It's a lot easier to zip up the files and link to them, let me tell 'ya! <<
Anyways, enough about that process (if you ever need help, jump into the #drupal IRC channel and see if webchick's around. If she is, she'll help you in no time!); here's the description of Drupal's newest contrib theme, Airy Blue:
Today I contributed my first 'original' piece of content to Drupal: a handbook page entitled Create a CSS-Only Theme. Since the first time I heard about the Stark theme (a Drupal theme which does nothing but expose all the 'stark' html output of Drupal core), I've been thinking of ways to enable designers to quickly build out unique and beautiful themes for Drupal. In Drupal 7, I think this will be a reality. (And maybe, just maybe, I'll create a theme for inclusion with Drupal 7 in the next few months).
Drupalers (myself included) are currently working on fixing the core template files in Drupal so they will provide enough CSS selectors to make web designers happy. We've finished the main template file, which lays out every page on a Drupal site. We're currently working on the 'node' template file, which lays out the main content area of each 'node' in Drupal. By the time Drupal 7 is released, we should have all the main template files fixed to the point where anyone can build a new theme for Drupal without ever seeing a line of PHP.
One area that needs a ton of help, though, is the Drupal 6 Theme Guide in the Drupal.org Handbooks. I've added one page (see the link at the top of this post), but the bigger problem is the disorganized nature of all the pages in the Drupal 6 handbook. I hope that we can get the pages organized in a logical and coherent manner, removing pages when needed, adding others, and rounding out the categories in an easy-to-remember way. Fellow Drupalers: what will you do to help?
I was browsing the Drupal Theme Garden a few days ago and was reflecting on how incredibly boring (if not ugly) a large share of the themes looked. Out of all the themes I viewed (over 50), I might consider using only 10 or so on a production site for a quick project that I didn't want to create a theme for.
Later on, I read this post on Steven Witten's blog [Acko.net] from 2007, and read through every single comment, because I am extremely interested in the issue of Drupal theming. If you are at all interested in helping Drupal be more themeable and appealing to designers, you must read the post linked to above. Go ahead - read it. I'll wait...
...okay, now that you're back,
A few of the comments in Steve's blog post deserve a mention...
From the blog posting itself: "Not enough Drupal people are savvy enough about theming and design to help out with even small tasks (like a banner) or even give quality tips and feedback on other work. The result is that theming and design receives little attention. Most contributed themes and sites could look a lot better, if they just themed it some more. And getting patches into core that give the defaults a little more oomph is tough, as they are often considered to be useless embellishments.