Back when I was using WordPress to build most of my sites, the process of theming (i.e., applying the look and feel to a website) was relatively simple. I’d mock up the design that I was thinking about, head over to wordpress.org, and find a theme that had the same basic structure as the site I was designing. Then I’d hack apart the files, customizing it with my own CSS and images. Changing the HTML output was pretty simple as well; as long as I could pick out the few bits of PHP code that were making the site render content and not mess with them too much, it wasn’t a big deal to customize container names or change the format of a given page.

When I did my first Drupal site, back when Drupal 6 was still relatively new, I thought the process would be about the same. I mocked up my template, went to drupal.org, and started searching for a contributed theme that looked sort of like what I was going for. Then I started trying to customize it according to what I’d mocked up.