Nick Lewis: The Blog

Note: I'm going to start regularly answering questions I get via email by blog. The reason being that email is a blackhole; and I am getting too many good questions everyday. When I have a few moments to answer, I figure I should make them available to everyone.

A reader by the name of Fouad writes:

Hi, I went through your tutorial on drupal themes, but it required a lot of programming experience. Isn't there an easier way to put together a drupal theme? For example, what if one wanted to start with an empty page, and build their theme from the groundup?

...is their a straight forward process to make 2 column/row, 3 column/row, 4 column/row themes?

Drupal themes are very straight forward... ...provided that you understand why they are straight forward, and why a more straight forward way is difficult (actually, impossible at present... that may change in Drupal 4.8 or 4.9).

Now, for the 99.999217 percent of the population that doesn't understand why drupal theming is straightf orward, I have bad news. You've got a lot of learning to do. In the beginning, the task of learning how to build a solid drupal theme is going to appear daunting, painful, confusing, sadistic, cruel, unusual, and most importantly, boring. I know these things because it wasn't long ago that I first started teaching myself HTML/CSS/PHP and began to learn how to apply it to drupal (November 2004). So forgive a LONG answer to a question that sought a short answer. Rest assured a short answer would have been a fairy tale.

In this post, I will attempt to provide those with little to no experience in web design a place to start. Let's begin with this overly simplistic but practical picture of what a drupal theme is:

Three Layers Written in Three Languages; Each with a Distinct Function

Drupal theming is an application of CSS/html/php programming. To ask "how can I learn theming without learning HTML, CSS and PHP?" is like asking, "How can I learn Jazz piano without learning how to play the piano?".