book review

All Things Theming - Review of Drupal 6 Themes

Submitted by evelyn on Wed, 2009-09-16 11:54

book review

Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling

This is a just a brief recommendation of Drupal 6 Themes, by Ric Shreves, which was another resource Greg pointed me to when I was just beginning to do my first Drupal theme.

This book was my first go-to source after I stepped into the theming waters. "How do I add a region? I'll look it up!" "What's the page.tpl.php do again - aha!" It kind of went like that. This book is simply a solid, reliable friend I can turn to for help.

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The Drupal Classic - Review of Using Drupal

Submitted by evelyn on Wed, 2009-09-16 11:37

book review

Using Drupal

When I got my first theming assignment and asked Greg for good learning resources, the first thing he did was hand me a copy of Using Drupal, open to chapter 11. (from the folks at Lullabot) So this is actually just a brief recommendation of Chapter 11: Theming Your Site, although I did refer to the rest of the book as needed.

This chapter was essential for me to pull together and understand the pieces of information and terminology I had been hearing and reading but had not yet put into practice. For a designer coming from building mostly static sites, having a conceptual overview of how Drupal works is critical before you get started with theming, and this chapter provides a beautifully clear and comprehensive a look at the inner workings of Drupal that should be helpful to all.

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The Drupal Themer's Book - Review of Front End Drupal

Submitted by Greg on Sun, 2009-07-12 11:52

I just finished reading Front End Drupal (buy on Amazon, companion site) and wanted to share some of my favorite points, some parts that could be enhanced, and some ideas I have for ways to expand it in a future edition. I've known Emma Jane Hogbin and Konstantin Käfer for some time now through the Drupal community and respected their work. So, I was quite interested to see how they would do in book medium: it's some impressive work. In my experience training and writing books, one of the hardest things is picking the right audience for the book and then making sure that your book has support for people above and below the level of your ideal audience. You need sidebars to help explain details on advanced topics and good section titles so that advanced people know when to stop skimming over the things they know and start reading again.

This photo shows a nice screenshot, some helper explanation text, and my next read in the background.

Favorite Parts of Front End Drupal

There are several general things and several specific things that I liked about this book:

They cover not only "Front End Drupal" but also some best practices for Web design and information architecture in general.
Mixed among the details of template files and overrides is solid advice about how to configure Drupal's core and several contributed modules so that a reader who is new to Drupal will learn much more than just theming.