A good introduction, but poorly structured and printed | Drupal 5 Themes

A must for all new Drupal designers! | Drupal 5 Themes | Ric Shreves

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	• Drupal 5 Themes Ric Shreves Packt Publishing, 2007 - 260 pages average customer review:based on 14 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

[relatively] easy to put together a website

Drupal is a popular instance of a Content Management System (CMS). Taking the idea of Cascading Style Sheets to a much more indepth instantiation. The book starts from scratch, assuming no prior experience by the reader with Drupal. The default installation comes with a set of templates, called themes within the Drupal context. Each theme includes both a look and feel and an accompanying functionality. Arguably, it is the combination of these that sets Drupal apart from a simple, first generation collection of look and feel templates.

An example of functionality is being able to have a blog or forums on your website. Nowadays seemingly ubiquitous on so many personal websites, and corporate ones at that. Another example is the aggregation of third party RSS feeds and the display of these. A point of Drupal is that nowadays, there is little value added in recoding functionalities like these from scratch. Drupal gives you commonalities that are now commodity features.

But equally germane to some readers is how Drupal manages to largely separate the UI designer aspects from the programming. So that different people, with different but complementary skill sets can jointly put together a website.

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A good introduction, but poorly structured and printed

Aimed at those with a knowledge of HTML and CSS but with no prior experience of programming, Drupal 5 Themes sets out to show you how you can quickly and easily get a drupal site up and running with a highly customised look and feel.

Drupal is highly themeable, with most aspects of the user interface being accessible purely in the theme layer without needing to dip into module development or the CMS' core. The book takes the user through the various theme hooks and introduces the simple PHP code needed to override them, add new `regions' (in which blocks can be displayed), customise existing themes and create your own (almost) from scratch. The primary focus is on the default theme engine, PHPTemplate, but others are referenced and a little time is spent on the options for building your own theme using raw PHP (without the extra layer of a theme engine).

For the most part the content is straightforward, and the reader should quickly get a feel for the naming conventions that drive the PHPTemplate approach. While not much programming knowledge is needed, it would be helpful for the reader to have a basic grasp of PHP and introductory programming constructs such as loops and conditionals. I was also surprised to find recommendations to name functions phptemplate_* within theme-specific template.php files, where they could instead be prefixed with the theme's name rather than `phptemplate'. PHP's not fond of functions that share names within the same context, and it is best to give those functions the most specific name available to you in order to avoid errors.

Given the fact that only HTML and CSS are listed as pre-requisites I was a little surprised that the PHP code wasn't introduced in a more focussed section. Given its simplicity it's to be hoped that anyone intending to spend much time building drupal sites would be able to figure it out, but while time is spent picking apart example code little time is spent actually giving a conceptual introduction or, for that matter, on explaining how to install drupal in the first place. Surprisingly, space was given to explaining how cascades work in CSS, which you would think is a fundamental part of a knowledge of CSS and unnecessary in this context.

This is the second book in a row that Packt has sent me for review where it has seemed that reference material is scattered too freely amongst the tutorial-style chapters. Significant chunks of space are given over to listing off functions, the locations of stylesheets, and so on, which is useful information but breaks up the flow of the book unhelpfully. It's surprising that that content wasn't moved to an appendix or, as with their jQuery books, a separate volume. Sitting in the middle of the book it feels like unnecessary filler (just one or two examples would do, along with a reference to an appendix, other volume, or online source) and the space could helpfully be given to more detailed tutorial material. That coupled with poor print quality and light paper stock (both also an issue with that previous book) gives the book a lightweight feel and reinforce its weaknesses.

This book should get an HTML/CSS developer who's not afraid to dip their toes into some PHP up to speed with customising a drupal site, and its worth considering if you've been mostly building static sites or customising wordpress and need a content management system with a wider range of features. Unfortunately it's still fairly weak structurally, and you may well find yourself needing to combine it with quite a bit of online documentation to properly cover the topics under discussion.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.

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A must for all new Drupal designers!

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.

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Great for first time Drupal themers

My first reaction to this book was fairly negative after looking though the table of contents. The book doesn't cover CCK or Views theming at all - 2 essential parts of almost any current Drupal site. I was hoping it would cover CCK and Views theming in detail. However, when I got over the initial disappointment, I found a lot of good content in the book. It explains how themes work in detail in Drupal 5, how to modify existing themes, find additional themes for Drupal, and making themes from scratch. It even covers theming forms and making your forms use button images (something that is not so straightforward in Drupal).

In the introduction the author, Ric Shreves, explains the books if for web designers and developers approaching Drupal theming for the first time. In this context, the book does a pretty good job. He says the book is not for hard core programmers.

For me personally, I have done some Drupal theming so some of the book is not so interesting. Yet, the book still highlights some areas like theming forms and template overrides that I need to look up when theming new sites.

The verdict? The book is work serious consideration if you are new to Drupal theming. If you are fairly experienced with themes in Drupal, look at the free download chapter and the table of contents to see if you think it offers enough value for you. Free chapter is here: [...]

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