tHOUGHTS & iDEAS

Drupal is one of the best PHP based CMS currently out there along with Joomla, WordPress to name a few. Each having its unique inherent features that differentiate each other. Previously I have worked with Joomla and WordPress (the CMS I’m using for my blog). While going through the Drupal CMS I found that it’s not just another CMS instead has a very powerful framework which can extend it functionality to suite our requirement through its diverse set of modules. Another wonderful thing about Drupal is that almost all the modules are freely available to download and it also maintains a neat and clear up-to-date documantation.

Before you going to start the development Drupal there are few things you need to consider.

• The Drupal version going to use (preferably 6.x- )
• Decide based on what theme you are going to work with. Based on your choice you can either start off with your own custom theme or make use of one of the contributed themes (Zen, Garland, Marinelli,etc…)
• If your preference is with Zen contributed theme then grab it and you also need to grab the zenophile module which allows themers to very easily create Zen subthemes without all the tedious file copying and find-and-replacing required when creating subthemes by hand and many more tedious work to a simple and an easy to understand single interface.

You are free to explore its power and flexibility.

Once you have the grab of the above tools you are good to go.

• Once you are finish with the main installation process navigate to the document root folder (the location where the install files are located.) Find the folder called sites. Inside that you’ll find two folders called all and default.
• Navigate to sites > all and create two folders called themes and modules and copy the Zen theme to themes folder and zenophile module to modules folder.
• Under administrator interface on the left side menu navigate to Administer > Site building.
  • Enable the zenophile module found on Modules page (Administer > Site building > Modules).
  • Find the Create Zen subtheme sub menu item on the Themes page (Administer > Site building > Themes).
• Inside the create Zen subtheme page fills out the basic information for your custom theme.
  • System name : Client name, all lower case, with underscores but without spaces
  • Human name : Client name, may contain uppercase letters, spaces, punctuation, etc
  • Description : Example: “centered fixed width CSS based theme for client name”
  • Site directory: ALWAYS place inside ‘ALL’
• Before submitting the form there are few more configuration parameters you needs to provide. Click on More option link and provides the values to meet your design layout

More information about working with Zen theme and zenophile module can be found here.