theme

Website admin skins/themes clearly have a big market. Just see many different options for Drupal hosted on drupal.org or some nice commercial ones on themeforest.net (not Drupal specific). Administration themes are great when you'd like to separate your administration interface from your front-end. And several Drupal studies showed that many people need this separation to understand where content is managed and what does everybody else see of the site. Of course your mileage may vary and there are all kinds of sites where community participation is on a level that admin/front end separation is meaningless. The point of this blog post is not even administration themes, so let's shelve that discussion.

Websites often replace traditional web applications as well, when the "front end" of the website is already some kind of data input / management UI, where the data is usually not in the form of textual posts with comments tagged by topics. Navigation is not primarily search based because pages for different functionality in the site are not searchable in a traditional sense. Finally, menus are not built by the site builders but rather the application author, putting in menus and navigational elements via code suited for the application.

In Drupal, this kind of theming needs a different approach compared to traditional admin themes, because the web application will most probably not offer the usual Drupal admin functions. For this role, a theme more like the general ones of themeforest's admin looks fits more.

If being a co-lead organizer for Drupalcon Szeged 2008, getting married in three weeks, moving flats and of course building products and services with Acquia would not be enough, I thought I'd top my Drupalcon participation with a nice surprise session submission.

If my session makes it (vote!), and you come to Drupalcon Szeged (you should), I'll teach you how can you convert an existing HTML/CSS template to a Drupal 6 theme in a matter of 45 minutes, with the full live demo from the ground up included with instructions. I've managed to do this before, so I am confident it should be lots of fun. We will break our Drupal site numerous times, and learn to live with it while the tough time constraints are looming on us, and should of course get to a gorgeous end result. We will convert the Modern World template by Solucija and will get to a Drupal 6 theme with blocks, menus a theme screenshot and all.

I'll also tell you how can you contribute the theme to drupal.org or through other means if the template license does not allow you to upload to drupal.org. This is of course not a requirement, since you might as well only work for your own client. You decide!

Just make sure to vote on my session, to help me get into the program and come to Drupalcon not only for this great session, but all the other fun programs which are on offer. You definitely should not miss it!