6th of June, what a better day to talk about drupal 6 ?

On DrupalCamp Vancouver, Mark Yuasa and Steve Krueger presented a Drupal Theming talk : 'Drupal Theming - From Design Draft to Theme. This presentation was the perfect occasion to share our recently-developed base theme that we use to theme production sites. That's right, we don't use the great ZEN THEME as most people do to start there own theme, but we prefer to work on a simpler base that includes only the functions that we always need for our projects.

To develop this theme, we basically made a list of all the things we would like to see in the theme, and compile them into a new theme. Of course, the result could be seen as a very light weight ZEN, as most of it is coming directly from it, but the main part of the work was not really to take what we wanted, but it was to get rid of what we didn't want. Also, we modified the css files to make them really simple, and created a folder hierarchy that we think is the cleanest way to work. Finally we added some custom functions (like the Truncate function, that we use to strip down some text in the node templates)

The result is pretty nice, and way less scary than the ZEN theme (well, a designer like me gets scared very easily with all these files :) ). It is really well adapted to extensive css development. Basically, there is just the minimum you need, but all the theming tools are there. You can download the base5 theme for Drupal 5 on the blogpost by Mark Yuasa

But that's Drupal 5... we are now, since few month already, in the Drupal 6 era, and even if it isn't used much yet, we had to prepare a theme that we will use to develop projects on 6: base6. And the best way to do this, is again, to have a look at the Zen theme ! But for the base6 theme, Drupal 6 is actually giving so much more possibilities that we didn't have to take much from Zen anymore. So we packed base6 with a new layout, two choice of layout : liquid and fixed, that you can change from the .info file, and updates on the body/node/comments/block classes. The css is still very light, and we tried to comment the templates as much as possible.

Theming in Drupal 6 is not that different from drupal 5 in a css point of view, but for those who just start on 6, have a look at the Theme Guide for Drupal 6 available on Drupal.org. It is very well explained, and gets you through all the new cool stuff, like the .info files for example.

You can download the first release of the base6 theme, it is still a dev version, but so far no bugs have been found cross-browser. We will make latest updates available through this blog.