Drupal 5 Themes

by Ric Shreves

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1847191827
• ISBN13: 9781847191823
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Great Drupal Resource

This book is exactly what I have been looking for. Being pretty new to Drupal I had been using the documentation at the Drupal site. It is good for starting off but my company, Savant Creative Group - [...] - needs to develop our own themes. The book is well written, well documented and not too heavy on PHP. It is great for design people who know html and css.

Great as introduction to Drupal 5 Themes!

Great book for web-designers/developers who start with Drupal 6 Themes. Can't wait for the Drupal 6 version or a book that addresses the more experienced Drupal Developers.

Drupal 5 Themes Fills a Need

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.

A must for all new Drupal designers!

If you are a designer wanting to learn Drupal, this book is for you. It is written by a designer so there are no programming sections full of code. It shows you how you can customize Drupal's HTML and CSS in detail. The book has a good amount of screen shots, charts, and other visual aids that really help the right side of the brain. The first 2 chapters are great setup chapters, so if you are new to Drupal they help you get started by telling many of the things designers need to know. There were several "ah ha" moments where concepts finally clicked because of the author's descriptions and examples. This is also a great reference book. It lists all the CSS files and theme functions that come in Drupal core with a short sentence on their content or purpose. There is an appendix that charts out all the Drupal core CSS files giving you a visual lookup of all ID's and classes for each CSS file. As I am not new to Drupal the organization was a little strange at first. Topics like overriding template files is covered a few times in first half with little detail. But after finishing the book the organization is more clear. The author spends time going over all the areas of Drupal theming to give you a good background then spends a few chapters modding an existing template and creating one from scratch where he goes into more detail. The last chapter covers Drupal forms which could do with a book of their own almost. But the author covered a lot of good material to get you started. "Drupal 5 Theming" doesn't cover CCK or Views theming. CCK and Views are contributed modules that almost every Drupal 5 site uses. It also doesn't cover any advanced theming topics. Which makes this book GREAT for the Druapl beginner, GOOD for intermediates, and FAIR for advanced themers. Also with Drupal 6 almost here, if you are worried this book will be out of date, don't. There are several theming advances in D6 but the background and understanding this book gives you still applies. Plus D5 is here for the foreseeable future so if you are working on a project now, it will make your job a lot easier.

Great for first time Drupal themers

My first reaction to this book was fairly negative after looking though the table of contents. The book doesn't cover CCK or Views theming at all - 2 essential parts of almost any current Drupal site. I was hoping it would cover CCK and Views theming in detail. However, when I got over the initial disappointment, I found a lot of good content in the book. It explains how themes work in detail in Drupal 5, how to modify existing themes, find additional themes for Drupal, and making themes from scratch. It even covers theming forms and making your forms use button images (something that is not so straightforward in Drupal). In the introduction the author, Ric Shreves, explains the books if for web designers and developers approaching Drupal theming for the first time. In this context, the book does a pretty good job. He says the book is not for hard core programmers. For me personally, I have done some Drupal theming so some of the book is not so interesting. Yet, the book still highlights some areas like theming forms and template overrides that I need to look up when theming new sites. The verdict? The book is work serious consideration if you are new to Drupal theming. If you are fairly experienced with themes in Drupal, look at the free download chapter and the table of contents to see if you think it offers enough value for you. Free chapter is here: [...]