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. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website. Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system. What you will learn from this book?

• Learn about the Drupal 6 Theming Architecture

• Find and install new themes

• Get the most from Drupal's theme configuration system

• Create a new theme from scratch

• Master PHPTemplate

• Modify the default templates and styles

• Override the default templates with your own

• Create dynamic styling which responds to the content or the user

• Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 18 Ratings

Technical book on how the theming works, not how to create themes - 2009-12-18
Reviewer Rating:
I found this book a bit disappointing. It is quite thin, the quality of the screenshots is not up to a level I expect today and the book jumps from basic configuring the Garland theme right into a full listing of all theme functions and items, which should have been an appendix.

Moreover, while the author claims that you should not touch the core-themes, the first thing he demonstrates is changing the CSS file from the Garland theme!

I do mean to finish the book completely, as the next section will (hopefully) be more project-oriented to tune the ZEN theme into a proper custom theme, which is what I need to learn next, but the first half of the book did not really win me over.

Nice comprehensive reference on Drupal theming - 2009-09-26
Reviewer Rating:
This book provides a comprehensive overview of Drupal themes. While it does work as a good reference in case you want to go back and look up something, I cannot say for sure it has a nice flow built into it or was that much fun to read. It did seem a bit repetitive. However, if you are interested in knowing how theming works in Drupal, this book does the job of covering it in detail.

Didn't contain information not found on the online documentation - 2009-07-29
Reviewer Rating:
I have been learning Drupal on my own for the last three months or so. I picked up this book because I wanted to learn how to theme custom menus so that my themes could have buttons. I figured a 300+ page book just about theming would have at least some information on how to theme your menu since I couldn't seem to find that information online anywhere. I was wrong. The author skims over the subject completely and seems to just be regurgitating all the information that is already available on the [...] website (which isn't very extensive at all). I swear I read parts where it almost seems copy and pasted from the online documentation.

In addition, the author spends 45 pages listing off possible candidate php files to make changes to how certain things are displayed, but doesn't give any explanation on how to take advantage of that information. It feels to me like he was just trying to take this book beyond 300 pages and threw that in at the last minute.

Overall, I was very disappointed by this book. Everything I learned could have been covered in 20 pages. I wish there were better alternative books on the market. The first couple of chapters may be useful for a total beginner who just wants to learn how the Drupal 6 theming system works. For anyone that already gets how a theme works, and wants to take the next step to creating real professional themes, this book is useless.

Less than expected - 2009-12-25
Reviewer Rating:
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.

Nice book for beginners - 2010-06-02
Reviewer Rating:
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.

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