Drupal 5 Themes: Create a new theme for your Drupal website with a clean layout and powerful CSS styling

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.

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for intermediates, and FAIR for advanced themers.Also with Drupal 6 almost here, if you are worried this book will be out of date, don't. There are several theming advances in D6 but the background and understanding this book gives you still applies.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.

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.

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.

A first release candidate of Drupal 6 was made available on December 20 of 2007, that is, 2 days prior to the publication of this theming guide, which covers Drupal 5. Drupal 6.1 has since been released, and many of Drupal's most popular add-on modules are now ready for use on production web sites. The author mentioned on his blog that an updated version of his book will be published, but Packt Publishing is not yet listing 'Drupal 6 Themes' among its upcoming publications. Still, I read the book, and worked through its examples on a Drupal 6 install. As a somewhat seasoned Drupal developer, I still found the book helpful. I highly recommend it, provided that as you read along you refer yourself to the concise (and well-put-together) Drupal 6 theming guide available on Drupal.org. Theming has definitely taken a leap forward in D6. For instance, intercepting and overriding theming functions is a lot easier now.What this book covers:Chapter 1 ("The Elements of a Drupal Theme") presents the theming terminology used in Drupal, and that hasn't changed in Drupal 6.Chapter 2 explains how to set up and configure a theme in Drupal through the admin interface. By way of example, we download the theme Gagarin from Drupal.org and install it. We also configure 'Garland', which still is the default theme shipped with Drupal. Surprisingly, I learnt quite a handful of tricks in this chapter. All of it is applicable to Drupal 6; even the neat PHP snippets used for the content & visibility of custom 'blocks' work as is. For fun, I ported the Gagarin theme to Drupal 6 in less than 10 minutes, using a porting guide put together by Wesley Tanaka. Your milage may vary (you may do it faster than I).Chapter 3 explains how the PHPTemplate 'engine' works. Wordy as it is, the definition of a theming engine remains somewhat ambiguous. You may download this chapter from the publisher's web site. Take note that the default PHPTemplate 'template' files have been moved to their respective core module folder in Drupal 6. For example, you'll find the default page.tpl.php file under /modules/system, and node.tpl.php under modules/node.Chapter 4 is a reference guide to stylesheets and themable (ie:overridable) functions. Only a brief description (ie: one sentence) is provided for each function. The author gives us a snippet of PHP code that produces a list of the theming functions used on the page, but it's somewhat useless because with it we don't know which function produces what markup. In Drupal 6, a neat & "sexy" add-on module, part of the 'Devel' kit of modules, tells us which function to override (and so much more): by Firebug-style point-and-click, we select the DOM element we wish to theme, and we learn how to do so through a 'tool tip'.Chapter 5 presents different ways to intercept & override themable functions. In Drupal 6, one of these ways has been simplified, that of "placing overrides in dedicated [template] files" for which no default file exists. One no longer needs to tell the theming engine about the presence of the template file, as we used to inside template.php. In the instance where we want additional variables to become available inside the template, we use the new Drupal 6 function themeEngineName_preprocess_hook.In Drupal 6, adding stylesheets (besides the default style.css) is as easy as adding a few lines in a new 'info' file for the theme. Same with creating new regions on the page : the theme.info file takes care of that. (For these, one needs not add any PHP code to template.php.)In chapter 6, we modify a theme, 'Zen'. Be warned : even the drupal-5 version of this theme has undergone significant change since the publication of the book.In chapter 7, we learn how to create a theme from scratch -- and so much more (this chapter definitely should have been broken down). We're finally presented with a list of the variables available in each template file. In Drupal 6, many variables have been renamed (for example, $sidebar_left has become... $left), and new handy ones have been created which are available in all templates, for exampe $logged_in and $is_admin. Note that we should use the new D6 variable $body classes to apply dynamic CSS styling, instead of the ol' $layout (still available).In chapter 8, we learn how to theme forms. I had to do some research to find how to apply the author's solutions within Drupal 6. Some change is trivial, for example the handy hook_ form_alter function has different parameters passed to it in D6, and one only needs to change the function's 'prototype', ie:From that in D5 : function modName_form_alter($form_id, &$form){To this in D6 : function modName_form_alter(&$form, $form_state, $form_id){In D6, some form-theming solutions are easier to implement... or more difficult: I still haven't figured how to use images for the forms submit button. However, imo, a CSS solution is preferred in Drupal 5 _and_ 6.What this book does not cover, and I wish it did:- How to use jquery, the wondrous javascript library shipped with Drupal (there is no mention of it, really).- How to produce a theme with a configurable color scheme, using the Color Module. A simple tutorial where we create a theme for which we can change the color of the header and/or links through the 'setttings' UI would have been awesome.- Related to the last point, we're not shown how to modify the theme's settings page - to add to it.- How to theme 'Views' pages, and nodes created with the Content Construction Kit (CCK).- How to commit a theme to Drupal.org CVS (using a freeware utility like TortoiseCVS, for example).This book is particulary successful at breaking down information into bits and steps. It's extremely well-written, quite technical and in-depth, and provides a handful of screen captures in most places. We can theme it _all_ in Drupal, and the author drives that point home.Where the book somewhat falls short in its delivery:- Although the author comes from a 'design background' (so it says in the book's preface), he fails to inspire. The theme created from srcatch is particularly unappealing.- When it comes to designing Drupal themes, we're faced with basically copying and pasting CSS rules scattered throughout a set of *.txt source files to one stylesheet.To be fair, this is not a book on CSS, nor web design.