Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook Review

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(More customer reviews)In Drupal or any Web development environment, the themer's job is to make the site look nice. This might mean making a Photoshop mockup into a real site, or implementing a design in another way. A themer is expected to use CSS, JavaScript and some Php to make this happen.
This cookbook offers recipes to help the themer do his job. The recipes start simple with tips on how to download a contributed theme from Drupal.org and install it. The recipes then quickly move to show you how to make a custom theme from scratch or using Zen as a base theme. One recipe walks you through the components of a theme step by step so you can get started on your own theme. The recipes build from there.
Some of the other basic recipes I like include: customizing a node template for a specific node type, including a CSS of javascript file in a theme, and optimizing CSS and Javascript for production sites.
I also really appreciated the fact that the author encourages the use of a custom module for theme customizations. A lot of themers get caught up in working their theme's directory only and never realize the advantage of using a module to add javascript to a specific page, change a form submit button into an image, etc... (The advantage is the code is more easily reused on another site).
What I especially like about the book is the fact that there are several good recipes for experieced themer's like me in addition to basic recipes. Some of the more advanced tips I looked included using Firebug's console.trace for JavaScript debugging, making Php variables available to JavaScript, and even a simple example of a Views Style plugin. I've been wanting to learn to make views style plugins to expose some of those cool jquery effects out there in the wild. This gives me great starting point.
The one thing I wish the book would emphasize more is most of implementing a theme still is writing CSS. Often the point of a fancy theme preprocess function is to add a CSS ID or class to some part of the markup so we can target it properly with CSS. This is however a small gripe.
This cookbook along with "Front End Drupal" are an essential part of any Pro Themer's library.

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Written in cookbook style, this book offers solutions to all common theme design problems through recipes. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by the analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The book is designed so that you can read it chapter by chapter, or you can look at the list of recipes and refer to them in no particular order. This book is written for Drupal developers who want to refresh the look and feel of their sites. If you are a Drupal site administrator who is looking to go beyond the basics and customize the presentational aspects of your Drupal site, then this book is for you. It assumes that readers are familiar with rudimentary PHP and acquainted with Drupal installation and general usage. Readers are also expected to have knowledge of CSS and XHTML.

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