Drupal 5 Themes Book

A while ago I received a new addition to my Drupal books collection, Drupal 5 Themes. For personal reasons I never got around to writing down my thoughts about it.

Being a developer myself, I thought it would be interesting to read about Drupal from a designers point of view. I even learned a thing or two that could be useful next time I need to modify a theme. I think the book is a good introduction for designers, it covers the basics without exposing the reader to large blocks of PHP code (although some PHP knowledge might be useful).

The first chapters explain the basics about how themes work and how pages are rendered in Drupal, including theming engines and how overrides work. It then goes on to showing how to modify an existing theme and eventually building a new theme from scratch. The final chapter has a short introduction on altering forms.

I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't mention some of the important contrib modules like CCK or Views. Also, some of the screenshots in the book were a bit difficult to read, probably because of the way they were converted from color to grayscale.

That aside, if you are new to drupal theming, this book is a good introduction. Of course, don't expect to know everything there is to know about drupal theming just by reading one book. The book was written for Drupal 5, even though Drupal 6 has been released by now, many of the underlying principles are still the same. So the book is still useful. If anything, theming has gotten easier in Drupal 6, see the theme update documentation and the theme guide for more information.