In an effort to give themers some "hands-on" experience with the technical aspects of theming in Drupal, I have created a "playground" at http://theming.isaacsonwebdevelopment.com. This site is built from a presentation (on theming Drupal) that I delivered at one of my local Drupal User groups meetings. It is both a "tutorial" and a demonstration of the concepts being presented in the tutorial. [Note: it is not a playground in the sense that you get to change things on the site. The playground moniker is meant as a reference to how you will play around looking at the different theme implementations using your favorite browser's inspection tool.]

Currently, I have four themes: Garland, theme2 (a Garland sub-theme that does only minor CSS tweaks), theme3 (a sub-theme of the Andreas03 theme, that also does minor CSS tweaks), and theme4 (a Fusion sub-theme, that makes use of template files, template suggestions, template.php, and template-settings.php).

The site is still a work in progress. For instance, theme4 is hardly built out. But, there is already a lot of information about the different "components" used to theme a Drupal site and I have included most of the code within the presentation so that you know how I did things.

You may create a user profile on the site so that you may view it in whichever one of the themes you choose; under your account settings click the edit tab and choose a theme. Then you may inspect the site with your favorite browser tool. I have also included comments in the theme4 template files so that you may view the page source to see which template is in use on each page.

I haven't enabled comments on the site. But, if you have suggestions (or corrections/criticisms) for things you would like me to add to the site (or things that are wrong or you don't like about the site), you may either contact me through my profile here on drupal.org or through http://isaacsonwebdevelopment.com/contact. Please don't leave comments on this page, as I may not see them as quickly. Instead, contact me directly through one of the methods mentioned previously in this paragraph.

Enjoy!

vegantriathlete

[Note: some of you may have experienced an "outage" in the playground site. I had switched servers and I forgot to port the site to the new server.]