By pan0s on

Which of the following three theme engines is recommended for theme development for someone that has a strong css coding background? (and why)

  • phpTemplate
  • Xtemplate
  • Smarty Theme Engine

Thanks in Advance
Panos

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

arshad236’s picture

arshad236 commented

How can i create different templates for drupal.which engine is better to use.anyone can help me. i am new on drupal and worried to create templates according the different requirements.

thanks

Arshad

kgp22’s picture

kgp22 commented

PHP Template. It's the most flexible theme engine. Your CSS skills would be useless if you can't alter the layer id's and classes, remove unnecessary variables and to basically change the way the site looks. Users are easily bored. We can't always have sidebars. We can't always have search forms on every page.
PHP Template is also the reason why I choose Drupal over all the other CMS/Blog tools. It's not very difficult to create a different view for every node type. Well, I'm still learning so I can't share too much. I have more questions than answers.

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Even a clock that does not tick is right twice in a day

pan0s’s picture

pan0s commented

moreover my aim is to create themes that are completely tableless....there is a theme in the downloads section called interlaced that is
entirely based on css. whats strange about it is that there isn any page template that the style.css file will be applied to it. So where all this styling is applied? In other themes using the phptemplate engine we find :

block.tpl.php
box.tpl.php
comment.tpl.php
node and page.tpl.php to which css styling is applied

in the intelaced theme nothing but the css files...
some enlightment here would be apreciated

kgp22’s picture

kgp22 commented

All of my themes are TABLELESS. Valid XHTML. Thanks to Firefox HTML Validator.

The styling is applied to all of those you've mentioned. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense to use style.css. You can override the default style of drupal for blocks, forms, etc. Take time to learn. As I work, I learn.

I also suggest that you dissect style.css to more css files like form.css, profile.css. I have experienced problems in keeping just one css file. When I dissected the style.css, everything looked so much better.

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Even a clock that does not tick is right twice in a day

pb8’s picture

pb8 commented

I believe almost everything can be themed in css, if the implementer is a "strong css coder", that is. Then the template/theme-engine plays a smaller part. Templates is for : "separating contents from code"

I believe SMARTY is the strictest, with its own subset of command. And the phpTemplest the simple.