Simple and brief tips on what helps me create a Drupal 5 theme
If you have questions you can contact me at jordan@gocubeco
If you are interested in having me create drupal themes for you, please visit my website: http://digibits.org.
I test my website in firefox and then make them work in IE. It's a pain to get them working in IE afterwards, but Mozilla's development add ons speed my development. Here's a list of modules I find helpful.
WORLDS BEST FIREFOX PLUGIN! Download it, use it, love it!
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page...
One of the best and oldest plugins for developers on firefox.
Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
You can use this to get colours from web pages you visit
Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies...
Allows you to measure width and height of objects on your webpages.
Provides useful information on how to speed up your website designs. Integrates into Firebug
There are a lot of drupal modules which will assist you in creating your theme. Here's my list of ones i've found useful.
Admin menu will speed administration of your Drupal site and thus speed up your theme creation time. It's a must have for any drupal admin/developer.
Devel module is create. It's got a bunch of great features like clearing your cache, displaying variables on a page, SQL query times and page memory usage. We will use it for the useful debug statements it provides. dpm and dpr (NO MORE print_r()'s!)
Because you've got to start somewhere...
This it the default Drupal 5 Theme. I have based my themes off garland. It comes with Drupal by default so you don't need to download it.
I've been told I should be baseing my themes of the zen theme, but I've yet to commit to this myself. You might want to start here instead of the default Garland
devel's modules dpm() function. dpm stands for Drupal Print Message (or something, i really don't know). You can do things like dpm($node) and the output will be something like this.
I change function theme() in theme.inc to include some HTML comments to let me know what theme functions are being called.