I'm getting ready to get my website online and for functionality I'm strongly leaning towards using a CMS, and thus why I'm here poking around the Drupal forums. What I'm trying to figure out in my CMS evaluation is what I'm going to be up against for getting my site incorporated with a CMS. What do I mean by that?

Basically the entire layout of my sites design has been created, at the moment my site is basically multiple .psd files (Adobe Photoshop) waiting to be converted into HTML which my designer has done before. However, neither of us have ever used a CMS so what I'm trying to figure out is what does it take to be my site to use Drupal, while completely maintaining the physical appearance (and completely custom layout) it already has?

Thank much!

Comments

desm0n’s picture

I would suggest having a poke around the current themes. You'll see that basic php is inserted in places where your content will be. So <?php print $content; ?> will print the body of your content for instance.

A theme is made up of various tpl files, but don't let that worry you too much as its not as daunting as it first seems.

The main file is page.tpl.php and you can think of this as your index.html file (which it pretty much is). Renaming your index.html to page.tpl.php will get your theme into drupal straight away. Then just work through the areas of content replacing them with drupal php (use an exisiting theme to kickstart this).

If your designer is a competent html coder he'll quickly understand how to do this.

You'll likely sub divide your pages into blocks (regions for unique content) and you'll define these through the block.tpl.php and CSS. Likewise forums if needed through node-forum.tpl.php etc.

Drupal allows full flexability when it comes to your theme so you define the areas you want to insert things then you can do so through the admin interface.

SO to recap, take a basic theme, bluemarine is always a good one, copy it to a new directory under your theme directory (name it whatever you like) then replace the page-tpl.php and start working through replacing your hard coded content with dynamic content (have the old tpl and the new one open and you should quickly see where your at).

Check out http://drupal.org/node/79285 for a better breakdown to get you going.

wpd’s picture

Yes. You can completely customize the site.
See this thread for may favorite example: http://drupal.org/node/52042

Having said that, your HTML designer will have to learn how to use drupal's themes and you may have to know a little PHP to do complicated themes.

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