Drupal 6 Themes Review

Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves is an update to his Drupal book of the same title.

I have to say I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand there is a lot of solid and helpful information in this book - in particular on the topic of overriding Drupal's default output which is a key concept and skill in Drupal. Drupal allows you to modify just about any part of the output to your heart's desire. Figuring out how is often an exercise in pulling hair. This book has two entire chapters on identifying and then overriding output which makes it a very useful reference for overrides. The last chapter is a Drupal Core CSS map. This is also very helpful as one of the most confusing things about theming in Drupal for the first time themer is - Where the heck is all this CSS coming from?

What the book does miss though, is a straightforward explanation of how to make a theme. In the real world, people who make themes are normally handed a Photoshop mockup or maybe and html/css mockup of a site. So how do I make this into html/css page into a theme? Drupal 6 themes doesn't get around to explaining this part until chapter 7/ page 171. In fact, the book covers, themeable functions, overrides and the Zen theme before making a theme. Huh? I would think we would want to learn how to make a basic theme first and then do overrides and learn about the Zen theme. I really think chapter 7 should have been chapter 2.

Chapter 8 "Dynamic Theming" gives a good overview of using multiple templates for the front page, admin section, node types. I wish it would have covered how to create a new page template for different node types. I have often used this trick to work create a newsletter edition for non-profit sites using a cck node reference page-newsletter.tpl.php to make a newsletter node into and email-able html newsletter.

Lack of coverage of CCK and Views theming was missing in the Drupal 5 version of the book and it is still missing. This is truly disappointing. To be fair, I believe the book was published when CCK and Views were not yet in stable versions for Drupal 6.

Overall, the book is a mixed bag, but have a look yourself http://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-themes/book#indetail and draw your own conclusions.