DXPR Drupal Blog

I think that both Todd and Morten have raised some very good points about difficulties with the theming landscape in the Drupal world, but I would like to offer my take on the issue.
First I will put on my economical hat and later on I will add some points from a developer point of view.

Product Life Cycle:

In the Joomla templates and Wordpress themes business, theme developers have already gone through all the stages that us Drupal folks will have to face in the near future. Premium Theme developers in Wordpress and Joomla appear to have gone through the classical Growth-Slump-Maturity pattern:

Are laid off IT workers discovering that sending spam is easier than getting a job these days? It sure seems that way, even with mollom running on all forms around a hundred spam comments get through every week, and they seem to get more clever every time.

I just found the following comment below my review of the Drupal 6 Javascript and jQuery book:

Submitted by san diego real estate (not verified) on Wed, 10/21/2009 - 18:55.
The only reason why I like this book is that this book developers deep into the usage of jQuery in themes and modules and there is interesting stuff in there for developers of any experience.

I can understand mollom didn't get that message because even I thought it was a real comment. I was much surprised to

Introduction

Disclaimer: The absolute numbers here are not representative for losooperimes of either application on your server.
The thing we're looking for here is how results compare to eachother.

Hardware:
-Acer Aspire 7720G l
-Intel Core 2 du0 T5250 with Santa Rosa chipset (1.5Ghz 667MHz FSB 2MB L2 cache)
-2GB DDR2

Software
-XAMPP package with Zend Optimzer disabled
-No opcode caching enabled
-MySQL query caching enabled with default settings
-Windows Vista running classic theme (yes vista is lame, I know)

-SVN checkout of joomla 1.5
-CVS checkout Drupal 6.1
-Jmeter
-Apache Benchmark

Part 1: Testing for load times with Jmeter

Test Setup:

The purpose of this contest is to get a really nice design, to be used as a premium drupal theme, and to scout for hot designer talent for future work.

Take a look over at 99designs (from Sitepoint) to read the details and following the contest:
http://99designs.com/contests/5944

No! I haven't posted on the blog in a while, but fact is I'm busier than ever and the stuff I'm working on is something that is going to change the landscape of Drupal theming greatly.

Besides doing client work, I have been working on premium Drupal themes to be sold on SOOPER. As far as I know, 2 other companies are doing the same thing. One of them is SEO Position, and the other is a new company that is going to take on the theme shortage with a huge effort, let's call this new start-up TNT for now. You'll learn more about them in the near future. (ps TNT is not owned by me).

The themes line of SOOPER is going to cater the market for omnipotent highly flexible themes that come with a high degree of configurability and generic but extendible designs, while the other 2 are going to provide a collection of niche templates.

I normally don't announce theme releases anywhere but this one is
special. I've worked hard to make this theme work well and the xhtml
template I was porting was well-coded as well.

It's easy to create a custom node with CCK, but what if we want to change how the node looks by default? It's a step up from theming your submitted and your terms code, but it's not really that hard. The main difference between theming the CCK node and the regular node is that in node.tpl.php, we have several content sections within a node, so rather than just printing $content, we will print out parts of the content individually. I will use code from the wallpaper node type of this site for my examples.

Step 0, before we get to the phptemplate part of this tutorial, you have to think to yourself if you really need to theme a specific node programmatically. In many cases, you can style a node just fine with CSS only, so first imagine how you want to theme your node and determine if you really need to get into the templating engine.