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.