Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Chapter 10. Working with Base Themes

Back when I was using WordPress to build most of my sites, the process of theming (i.e., applying the look and feel to a website) was relatively simple. I’d mock up the design that I was thinking about, head over to wordpress.org, and find a theme that had the same basic structure as the site I was designing. Then I’d hack apart the files, customizing it with my own CSS and images. Changing the HTML output was pretty simple as well; as long as I could pick out the few bits of PHP code that were making the site render content and not mess with them too much, it wasn’t a big deal to customize container names or change the format of a given page.

When I did my first Drupal site, back when Drupal 6 was still relatively new, I thought the process would be about the same. I mocked up my template, went to drupal.org, and started searching for a contributed theme that looked sort of like what I was going for. Then I started trying to customize it according to what I’d mocked up.

I cried my way through that first site. And drank more coffee than I care to talk about.

As I started to chat with other designers about this problem, I realized I wasn’t alone. Drupal’s theme layer is impressive, flexible, and powerful; it’s also confusing as hell until you get used to it. The biggest layer of confusion is this: while in WordPress, it’s generally fine to download a theme package and start hacking it up to customize it, you don’t want to do that in Drupal. Why? ...