An Introduction
Hi, and welcome to my Drupal blog!
I'm Laurence Mercer, a freelance web designer/developer from London, and I use Drupal on an almost daily basis. I love the whole Drupal package of course, but I am particularly fond of Drupal theming.
Drupal's theming potential is huge, and I think it's deeply unfortunate when people throw around the same tired old argument that Drupal may be powerful, but it just can't look good - this is a load of BS in my opinion.
I think it's no reflection on Drupal that there maybe aren't a huge number of great looking Drupal sites. It's not that Drupal can't be made to look good, it's simply that it hasn't been done so on a large scale yet.
Hopefully, via this blog, I can share some of my knowledge with people about Drupal theming and learn some stuff in return. Mostly I'd just like to have a good discussion about the whole Drupal theming process, and help people understand things a bit better.
Naturally I'll be looking at things from a designer's point of view, so it shouldn't get too code crazy for anybody (I know from experience that some of the posts on drupal.org can look a bit daunting for the non-programmer). Also, I'm going to aim to blog every two or three days so that people can get a good sense of what I'm up to, and there's always some fresh stuff to get stuck in to.
If you have any questions or suggestions I'd love to hear them - just drop me an e-mail via the contact form or leave a comment.
Anyway, that's enough rabbiting for now :)
I hope you enjoy the blog,
Laurence.
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here here....couldn't agree more, looking forward to reading more!
Hey, cool site! As a fledgling Drupal Designer but lackluster programmer, I think it would be great if you could post some good/oftentimes useful theme override guides.
This seems to be the limit that most fresh designers struggle with in molding Drupal to meet their vision. Nearly anything can be done with the CMS, but the matter of knowing, or figuring out how, seems well beyond most of us.
Laurence,
This is wonderful. I look forward to your insights.
Hey guys,
welcome and thanks for commenting.
Dan - thanks for the suggestions - was there any particular stuff you had in mind?
(Btw, in classic 'I knew I'd forget something' style I've just realised that I haven't applied any override to this author comment so it won't look any different from normal guest comments - d'oh!
Guess what I'll be doing tomorrow... :)
Laurence.
I look forward to reading your posts. I've adapted several existing themes for various sites I run, but that's been a matter of changing css and images. I would love to learn how to build a theme, and in particular, I'm interested in learning how to change the theme based on the type of pages/content being displayed. Before Drupal 5.x, this could be done by assigning themes to sections, but now it seems to be much more difficult.
One more thing: I was just looking at the King's College London site (http://www.kclgns.co.uk/)--very nice!--and I would love to know how you insert the images for section headings in the text. I use a plugin to accomplish this in WordPress, so images are dynamically created and displayed for my blog post titles; I haven't seen a way to do this in Drupal.
It's nice to see that more and more people are willing to share their knowledge about Drupal and drupal theming.
Looking forward to read more from your blog.
--
http://themegarden.org - Drupal Themes Live Showcase
Laurence, thanks for the explanation. I've done the manual replacement before, and that's great for static pages. It's the dynamic content I am interested in. I've seen mentions of the sIFR module before but haven't tried it yet because I don't have Flash (it's beyond my budget). About a year ago, I searched for an open source tool that would allow me to create an .swf font file, but I couldn't find anything. WordPress has a plugin that uses a .ttf font to render the images, and that's been great because no software is needed for the font.
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