Drupal themes

One of the greatest things about the Drupal CMS is that it can support *any* look and feel you want it to in a just click of a button. Or at least it can once you have the theme you want designed and "Drupalized".

Themes/designs are a very unique part of a web site, because they they simulataneously are "just" a wrapper for the content on your site - while at the same time being *the* main element which keeps your site from just being a bunch of text splattered on a page (screenshot of this page without an active theme).

So, the visual design of your site is one thing in itself, but it's only a beginning, and in a proper site construction a theme should start out literally as a 'pretty picture', mocked up in Photoshop for easy experimentation/changes.

What happens after this stage in theme development is an entirely different case altogether, because now we're moving from a 'pretty picture' to working code, which will affect browser compatibly (do Internet Explorer 7 users see your page as a blob?), download speed, and usability (does the link to the contact page not work for Firefox users?).

The coding stage is where expertise and testing become necessary in order to keep a your design from becoming a nightmare in terms of usability, compatibility, and flexibility.

So you've got an Xtemplate that you need to convert to the PHPTemplate format because you've found out that the Xtemplate has become a third rate citizen at Drupal.org? (many modules don't support Xtemplate themes anymore, Drupal.org doesn't consider it a "supported" format, and "theming" Xtemplates is much harder than with PHPTemplates)

Well, no problem.

With a little work it is relatively easy to convert your Xtemplate into a much more compatible, supported, and extensible PHPTemplate. In fact, there's a very good handbook page at Drupal.org about this issue which I came across and have used to convert several of my own Xtemplates.

This article is provided for do-it-yourself'ers who would like to customize their site's theme colors, (which will be a good warm-up for doing other things with your theme, btw). With this information and a some patience it's should not be too hard to change your template's colors around yourself, so take heart, and quit your shakin' already!

To change theme colors, the file you'll usually want to edit is called "styles.css" and it can normally be found inside your selected theme's folder. Every great once in a while you may also need to edit "drupal.css" which is located in the "misc" folder of your root Drupal directory, but most of the time this is not the case.

So now let's get editing:

If you have the theme_editor.module installed you can just edit the styles.css file inside your browser window, but it may be a lot easier to see and/or search and replace things if you copy and paste the contents of " style.css" into a proper text editor like like NoteTab Light for instance ( http://www.notetab.com/ntl.php ). It is VERY important NOT to use a rich-text application like Microsoft Word or Wordpad for editing because those programs will introduce invisible characters which can screw up the processing of your code! Believe it or not, the otherwise enemic "Notepad" which comes with windows CAN be used for editing code, since it is plain-text based and not rich-text.