Product Description
In Detail Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website. Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system’s front and back-end interfaces. Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6… More >>
Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling
Tags: choices, cms website, content management system, exceptional design, flexibility, open source content, open source content management, open source content management system, php mysql, templating
#1 by Steven Kessler on June 30, 2010 - 8:18 pm
Drupal 6 Themes is great if you are a themer who needs a bit of a push to move forward with your themeing skills. I would say that most everything in the book can be found with Google but I like books and having things brought together in one place.
Rating: 4 / 5
#2 by Nathan Smith on June 30, 2010 - 9:13 pm
I recently read Drupal 6 Themes, by Ric Shreves – a partner at design and development firm Water&Stone. I found the book to be a great resource.
Drupal 6 Themes Lately I have been digging further into Drupal, an open source content management platform that describes itself lightheartedly as “community plumbing.” This plumbing has been used to power many high profile sites, which all have their own distinct look and feel. It appeals to me because it’s more powerful than simple blogging software, but with that comes a bit of complexity. Thankfully, it is actually quite intuitive once one makes sense of how it works.
This allows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of design. Looking at sites that use Drupal reads like a veritable who’s-who of technology / innovation…
* csail.mit.edu
* fastcompany.com
* infoworld.com
* linuxfoundation.org
* recovery.gov
* research.nokia.com
While some have criticized Drupal in the past as being difficult for designers to customize, and that was probably a valid concern (at the time), the latest version is quite designer friendly – made so via the PHPTemplate engine that is built into the system. While it is “just” PHP, it is quite a bit simpler in terms of building templates than writing out raw code long-hand. So one could say, it is as designer friendly as other systems that rely on PHP for templating.
Shreves did a great job covering all that is possible within Drupal, from a design standpoint. He begins by explaining how the inner workings of the system fit together, and how this allows for a designer to override and tweak everything. He then shows how to take an existing theme and build a sub-theme.
Of course, this is all just a precursor to chapter 7 and beyond, where Shreves really shines, showing you how to build your own fully customized themes. That’s not to downplay the importance of the foundational material, as the earlier chapters build well upon each other. I am simply saying I found the chapters on doing your own design from scratch especially inspiring.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book to any code savvy web designers who are looking to take their skills to the next level with a full-fledged content management system. With newly acquired skills, you will be able to confidently tackle enterprise scale projects, building upon the versatility of Drupal.
Rating: 5 / 5
#3 by Antonio R. Tijerino on June 30, 2010 - 10:11 pm
I have read most of the book and it is easy to read. The first few chapters are a good review of Drupal and how it works, for me Chapter 6 is where the meat of the book begins.
I would recommend this to anyone wanting to understand more about Drupal theming.
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by E. Martin on June 30, 2010 - 10:58 pm
The book covers many aspects of Drupal theming that require much more detailed explanation, that the book does not give, and in many cases it’s of little use to those without a good knowledge of programming Drupal.
Rating: 2 / 5
#5 by T. Fridman on July 1, 2010 - 1:41 am
I bought this book once considered to upgrade my platform from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6. I did not find much in the book, especially not for advanced Drupal users.
Rating: 2 / 5