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By Oliverjet on
I am a web designer that has been hired by a company to rebuild their website. I have hand coded the site, and its 90% done but now they are asking my to move it over to Drupal because the head devs want to start implementing it as a CMS. I have never used Drupal before, and I am having a real hard time understanding what I have to do to get the site operational. I am overwhelmed with the capabilities of Drupal, and I really don't need most of the extra's that are available. I have tried to watch tutorials, I have tried installing themes and editing them but I am really getting no where. I have tried to search the forums to answer some questions, but please somebody I need some help. Here are some of the problems I am facing:
1. A blank theme, I have already designed the website. I need to know how to place my files so that the CSS i created will link to my html. Or how do I create a custom module? Is that what I supposed to be doing instead?
2. I downloaded a "core" but even after following instructions and placed my custom CSS files in the suggested folders, it doesn't link. Can anyone link me to how to fix this?
3. I am the only web designer here and will be the only one making changes to the site, can I just bypass using Drupal for the website templates and whatnot and use it for server space I guess? I'm just really confused what the benefits to using Drupal in my situation.
I'm sorry if these seem like very beginner questions, but I cannot seem to make any headway and I've been trying to figure all this out for days. My head dev's aren't very familiar with the Drupal process either so I don't have anyone to reach out to for help. It seems like the community here is amazing so I wanted to reach out and see if I can get any pointers for this. Thank you so much!
Comments
Your confusion is
Your confusion is understandable - there's a lot to absorb.
You may benefit from a good general intro to how Drupal basically works, such as Using Drupal (O'reilly Press).
The business of making your Drupal site use your CSS and so forth is a theming task, as you've deduced.
Rather than start from a new theme you'll probably be better off starting with one of the well-engineered base themes - Adaptive Theme, Omega, Bootstrap, etc. - and creating a subtheme from that. At least you'll have a bunch of stuff that already works.
Once your subtheme is in place, you'll have adapt your CSS to address the markup elements that the theme provides. This will be quite a fussy process.
Begin by adding a custom style sheet to your theme's .info file - see the Theming Guide here on D.O for guidance.
You may also have to override the theme templates to get the markup you need if you can't get what you want using the existing output.
Unfortunately you can't just drop a bunch of HMTL and CSS somewhere have have it work - sorry.
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