Drupal 7 Themes

I was expecting more of a hands-on approach to learning about Drupal Theming. The book has a chock full of good references to all the various core components relating to theming and does a good job of a good reference.Now to get coding. :)

The techniques to make a theme your own are fully described in detail. How these techniques interact with the Drupal environment are also well described. This book is a good read for an experienced web designer or developer meaning knowledge of HTML, CSS and a little PHP.

This quickly taught me about what I needed to know about Drupal 7 themes

If you are looking for a detailed description of how to build a theme, this is not your book. Anyway it covers a lot of information about fundamentals in Drupal 7 theming. If you already know about HTML and CSS then you take more advantage of the book.

My goal in buying this book was to learn to create a custom theme from scratch to gain greater control and avoid the overuse of div and class tags that are common in so many drupal templates, as well as to learn how to build on that theme by adding more pages and customizing them. I am nearly finished with the book but am no closer to that goal than when I started. While I was able to write a page and a half of useful notes concerning other areas, I was disappointed to learn that the book dedicated all of 2 pages to the complex topic of custom theming from scratch (pages 144-145), the vast majority of which covers the issue of nesting HTML inside the PHP as a best practice and a review on creating a css file. I was hoping to find a systematic breakdown and explanation of the page.tpl.php file, not only of the php code (an easy task given that the page.tpl.php is all of 90 lines of code and is largely repetitive) but a demonstration of creating and implementing a new region within the page.tpl.php with any available options for variations described. Since a very general overview of the page.tpl.php file was given on pages 74-78 I was anticipating a further breakdown of this topic deeper into the book. I am not intimately familiar with php syntax but am able to easily grasp the concept if it is explained even to a minimal extent, however, in that section (pages 74-78) large chunks of code are described as to their general purpose and not explained in any depth, such as:"The following excerpt includes the logo, the site name, and the site slogan. As the statements are all conditional, the output will only be displayed to the site visitors, if the site administrator has enabled the items in the Theme Configuration Manager" (pg 76, Shreves' complete explanation).For a book dedicated to Drupal theming, it is disappointing that a much better, but outdated (as of this writing) job of covering the topic of breaking down the page.tpl.php file and building a custom theme from scratch is done at [...] at least to an extent that can be copied and pasted by a reader, and "Drupal 7 Themes" should have at least included a link to that page in the book, given the extent to which the book covers the topic itself...Final verdict: 3 stars for having some useful information that I will probably refer to in the future but failing to delve deep enough into the specific issue of building a custom theme from scratch by modifying the page.tpl.php page, which is what I bought it for even though the name implies that it should have, and minus 1 star for the failure of the support editor to get back to me or to take action when I brought up these issues before the book was even released.

This book seems to be pretty much what I've been looking for - a straight-forward exposition of Drupal's theming layer in version 7 that assumes some Web development experience and incrementally builds upon the instruction through the book.However I need to note that I'm shocked at how poorly it was edited, if at all. In fact I doubt that there was even too much proofreading applied. Sentences routinely break at bizarre places, it can be hard at time to interpret the point of some phrasing, and there are many obvious typos as well.Given that, this book is still a trove of very helpful content as, even with all of the Drupal material online, I've found it almost impossible to find one source that can expose the amazing applicability yet extremely arcane structure of the theming layer as well as this book does. If you already have some Web development under your belt but are fairly new to Drupal, I'd highly recommend getting this book as at least the first step towards understanding how it all works.

I own the latest version of the book. I bought it as I was hoping that this would be better than the version that pertains to drupal 6. This, unfortunately, is not the case. How a whole book on drupal theming can be written without mentioning hook_theme() is hard to understand. Hello? What an incredible omission! It also does not cover the new render arrays/function render(). There is mentioning of drupal_render(), but, as is the case throughout the book, the reader is referred to the online articles on the drupal site. I wonder why it does not occur to the author, whenever he is writing something like "Visit the Drupal API to learn more about these important functions. See XXX", that this is exactly the material that he should cover. That is the reason why I would want to read the book in the first place, because the important things ARE COVERED!Not to mention numerous errors ...I'm not saying the book is useless. But I do say that you should not get your hopes up to high.Best,Dieter

This book was laid out well and logically, each chapter built on the previous chapter. If your new to Drupal themeing, this book is a good introduction. Depending on where you are on the web site development learning curve, this book was either an easy read, or a slow down and look at the drupal 7 admin menus to understand. The author went over the template system, how to do different themes for different pages, recommended modules to help in your efforts, how to set up custom CSS files, and even theme functions that you can use in different content pages. This is a difficult topic, because there is so much information to cover, I thought the author did it well.