A recent post by one of the designers that worked on the fabulous Garland theme has sparked a very interesting conversation about the problems surrounding developing themes for Drupal, of which there are many. The comments there are well worth the read. I will have more to say on this once I have get a little farther along in “developing” my own Drupal site and playing around with the foundation theme, right now I’m still too new to Drupal to get into specifics.
However, I offer these two points:
1) Drupal, being so powerful and extensible, creates a huge problem for designers in the sheer number of types of modules and content a theme has to handle. Calling for themes that are created for a specific kind of Drupal site (e-commerce, blog, brochure, etc.) is an excellent idea.
2) Although designers can be belladonnas, oops!…I mean primadonnas and/or lone wolves, there is a way for them to participate with the development community concerning themes. It would just have to work a little differently what people have been used to. I think the method used by TWiT tv to design their Drupal site is one that can be used to the advantage and purpose of bringing themes to Drupal, which is described in this podcast by Lullabot. Essentially, a designer would come up with the graphics, the CSS (most of it, anyway) and the overall site layout and conventions. Then, a team of folks like myself and more experienced programmer types would work on extending the theme so that it works with Drupal.
It would take a major change in approach but it is do-able with the community we have.
Designing for Drupal
A recent post by one of the designers that worked on the fabulous Garland theme has sparked a very interesting conversation about the problems surrounding developing themes for Drupal, of which there are many. The comments there are well worth the read. I will have more to say on this once I have get a little farther along in “developing” my own Drupal site and playing around with the foundation theme, right now I’m still too new to Drupal to get into specifics.
However, I offer these two points:
1) Drupal, being so powerful and extensible, creates a huge problem for designers in the sheer number of types of modules and content a theme has to handle. Calling for themes that are created for a specific kind of Drupal site (e-commerce, blog, brochure, etc.) is an excellent idea.
2) Although designers can be belladonnas, oops!…I mean primadonnas and/or lone wolves, there is a way for them to participate with the development community concerning themes. It would just have to work a little differently what people have been used to. I think the method used by TWiT tv to design their Drupal site is one that can be used to the advantage and purpose of bringing themes to Drupal, which is described in this podcast by Lullabot. Essentially, a designer would come up with the graphics, the CSS (most of it, anyway) and the overall site layout and conventions. Then, a team of folks like myself and more experienced programmer types would work on extending the theme so that it works with Drupal.
It would take a major change in approach but it is do-able with the community we have.