The Graphic Designer has a easy task to design the website from her point of view. A Photoshop representation of how the site should look is created and passed to a.graphic coder takes the representation graphic and converts it into html, css and series of images this is the template. The template is used as the basis for a program to render content.
For each platform there is a specification for construction of a template. For drupal this spec is called Themer Guide and is highly detailed but is over 500 pages long when printed. What I believe we need to create is a basic Theme template which can be used with well organized locations to place HTML, CSS and image to construct a drupal theme.
Adapting a template comes is two parts the page layout of regions plugged in the template and styling of content within the regions. The styling of content requires that the content is marked correctly to be addressed by CSS, because drupal has modular generation of content we can expect certain challenge when many modules are used.
I propose an experiment build a experimental template based on the Flan 2 template and see how content is rendered and how CSS can be customized. Stay tunned.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Drupal and Web Themes
Drupal is the largest used Content Management System
I recently found out that drupal is the top CMS Content Management System by a buildwith.com stat, I had been using Joomla and was surprised to see that drupla greatly exceed joomla in the usage category. The biggest category is 95% of the sites have no CMS detected. It is likely that the 95% use some kind of home rolled CMS system as I had used in the late '90 to run a political party site where I used Frontier and hacked a few content scripts to get the whole thing to work. At that time tabled based layouts were how it was done. CSS was buggy and largely unimplemented cross browsers. I also worked from a Mac and uploaded the pages to my ISP server.
Photoshop graphic designs are now turned into HTML/CSS Templates
Today at least a decade later web design has come a long way. It is typical to do design work in Photoshop to create the site look and feel and then have that graphic image serve as the basis for a CSS design for a site. Given prudent font choices by the graphic designer a functional website can be build by slicing various pieces of the Photoshop design. Usually this involves creating an HTML/CSS template for the site which controls how the site looks. The CSS in the template contains markup the determines which sections of contents are which type by which the CSS encodes this information into graphic locations, colors and styles.
The Flan2 Template
I use the Flan2 Template at http://oswd.org/ to run tests on how easy it is to construct a web template for use with drupal. This is not the drupal way to build a template, actually in drupal the template is called a theme. In drupal the recommended method is the start with a template that is close to your vision and then modify it for use. The drupal Xen theme is nothing template that can be customized for many purposes. My choice is to write a template directly from the open sourced one Flan2, since I think it is more likely that the drupal developer will be presented with example templates from "the Boss" or "the Site Owner" and I want to see how hard this process is for drupal.
I recently found out that drupal is the top CMS Content Management System by a buildwith.com stat, I had been using Joomla and was surprised to see that drupla greatly exceed joomla in the usage category. The biggest category is 95% of the sites have no CMS detected. It is likely that the 95% use some kind of home rolled CMS system as I had used in the late '90 to run a political party site where I used Frontier and hacked a few content scripts to get the whole thing to work. At that time tabled based layouts were how it was done. CSS was buggy and largely unimplemented cross browsers. I also worked from a Mac and uploaded the pages to my ISP server.
Photoshop graphic designs are now turned into HTML/CSS Templates
Today at least a decade later web design has come a long way. It is typical to do design work in Photoshop to create the site look and feel and then have that graphic image serve as the basis for a CSS design for a site. Given prudent font choices by the graphic designer a functional website can be build by slicing various pieces of the Photoshop design. Usually this involves creating an HTML/CSS template for the site which controls how the site looks. The CSS in the template contains markup the determines which sections of contents are which type by which the CSS encodes this information into graphic locations, colors and styles.
The Flan2 Template
I use the Flan2 Template at http://oswd.org/ to run tests on how easy it is to construct a web template for use with drupal. This is not the drupal way to build a template, actually in drupal the template is called a theme. In drupal the recommended method is the start with a template that is close to your vision and then modify it for use. The drupal Xen theme is nothing template that can be customized for many purposes. My choice is to write a template directly from the open sourced one Flan2, since I think it is more likely that the drupal developer will be presented with example templates from "the Boss" or "the Site Owner" and I want to see how hard this process is for drupal.
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