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Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling | 
| Author: Ric Shreves
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $35.99
You Save: $4.00 (10%)
New (15) Used (4) from $35.99
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 27195
Media: Paperback
Pages: 312
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 7.4 x 0.7
ISBN: 1847195660
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781847195661
ASIN: 1847195660
Publication Date: October 13, 2008
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Product Description
The ideal introduction to theming in Drupal 6. The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity - you don't need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system. Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful. Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way.
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| Customer Reviews:
 This is a very useful book December 19, 2008
M. Helmke
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have used Drupal to administer sites for years. It is flexible, powerful, and relatively easy to use. The one area of Drupal where I have been weak is theming. Generally, I have used contributed themes, maybe modifying colors, logos, and other simple things.
The one or two times I felt ambitious and tried to read through the documentation in order to learn how to create my own theme from scratch, I either got distracted by life, or found myself getting tired of the search and wishing I had all of the information I needed in one place to learn how to create a theme.
This book has impressed me. It is well-written, using clear language, useful diagrams and figures, and a logical progression of ideas. It starts with the basics, talking about what a theme is and defining its components. Then, it moves into the details of modifying the default themes. Up to this point, I didn't encounter anything new to me, but I was only up to chapter two.
Starting with chapter three, the book reveals and clearly describes each of the files and elements that make up a theme, using both the default PHPTemplate engine as well as other options. Later, the book teaches how to use and master this template engine to create your own custom theme, including how to create custom looks for specific pages, modules, and more.
In between the two, you learn how to download ready-made themes, contributed by the Drupal user and developer community, and modify them for personal use, knowing how and where to look for usage restrictions to avoid problems.
Finally, the book ends with some very useful appendices that show where to find every css file and what it affects, and other useful tooks and kits for developers.
This book has saved me a lot of time, and is well done. If you are responsible for a site powered by Drupal, you may find it useful as well.
 Drupal 6 Themes right on time! November 7, 2008
Michael Hofmockel
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Less than 5 months ago I posted a review of "Drupal 5 Themes" by Ric Shreves. I was really jazzed to have our first book dedicated to theming Drupal. But I was concerned that it was trailing too far behind Drupal's release schedule. At that time, I had already launched my first Drupal 6 site and was working on my exit plan from Drupal 5 development.
5 months later, I'm still working on my exit plan from Drupal 5 and now I have a tool to help me. "Drupal 6 Themes" by Ric Shreves has moved me closer to being Drupal 5 free. On a personal note, I have vowed to start all new projects on Drupal 6 and I'm sure to reach for this book. Keep up the pace Ric, Drupal 7 is closer than you think.
So many great Drupal books have come out this year (at least in title). I have not been able to look at them all yet. The maturing of Drupal as a platform is reflected in more focused books and Drupal theming deserves some focused attention. Theming is increasingly stretching the traditional tool-kit of the designer. No longer can the designer just turn over their work to be implemented by the developer. Gone are the days when designers can remain naive to server side scripting (PHP).
Some big changes have come in Drupal 6 theming. Themes, like modules, now have .info files, allowing us to enumerate and version our themes with out having to load the entire code. Hook_theme() is our new friend, theme functions must now be registered instead of being discovered on the fly. But the most interesting change for me, is that themes can now override core- and module-defined CSS files. I can't tell you how much time I have wasted tracking that class down to some random module style sheet gone wild. A new Jquery version is nice too. Ric covers all of these new features and simplifies the basics.
I am definitely recommending this book to designers and Drupal beginners. It covers all the basics and gives you a running start at developing your first Drupal 6 theme. But I was disappointed, as in the previous book, there was no material on how to theme the most common contributed modules like CCK, Views and Panels. Drupal's true glory and power come when you successfully mashup 30+ modules on top of Drupal core. I guess we need even more focused books titles like, "Drupal 6 Views 2 Theming".
This book hits the target October 28, 2008
Joseph Moraca (Sarasota, FL USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Every book has a target audience - this book's is pretty narrow is scope - people that want to understand how theming drupal 6 works. Ric Shreves hits the target! I am a mid level drupalite - not a ninja programmer or designer but not a beginner either. I found it very helpful.
Theming is the "art" of making your website look exactly how you want it. This book shows you everything you need to know on the technical side of how to make that happen. The book doesn't give design help - there are other resources for that - but if you are a good web designer and want to understand how to make drupal "pretty" this book is the best resource out there. With this book and CSS and graphic design skills you can make it happen.
Certainly all of the information in the book can be found on http://drupal.org or on other related websites, but what I like about a book is that it is focused on just the topic at hand - "drupal 6 theming" and it is in a format designed to "cover all of the bases."
As I was reading it (I have read the whole book) I found things that had stumped me -- things that are not obvious and often left out of discussions on the drupal.org discussion forums(but if you search you can find the answer) -- like to use node-story.tpl.php you have to have node.tpl.php in your theme directory ... I saw this detail noted several times in the book.
Overall I highly recommend this book and another PACKT book Learning Drupal 6 Module Development together they are very good ways to improve your drupal skills.
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