A little foreword on Drupal theming

Most of you reading now aware of that it’s said: Drupal is a great CMS. It is a completely flexible platform and serves as a great foundation to build nearly any kind of website. It has a well structured system which nearly completely separates code, content and style. Perhaps this flexibility causes most issues when dealing with theming. Creating templates for Drupal is wonderfully simple when it comes to the basics. Vast documentation and a helpful community stands there for the template developer but there are so many possibilities and so many available options that it’s often not enough.

Apart from creativity, developing themes for Drupal needs a widely open brain who understands the logic behind the scenes and can take the advantage of flexibility. Indeed it needs both a designer and a developer in mind.

During one of my latest works I realized why the majority of Drupal themes are very similar, because its developers don’t take their time to go beyond the basics. I believe this is a must if you wish to create something that you want to be outstanding from the crowd. Nada to say Ubiquity isn’t that outstanding that way, too. As you can see it only serves basic needs but it might be a nice base for customizing.

Anyway, I decided to publish some of my theming tricks, bits and pieces what I used before. It will cover css, php and Drupal. I mostly use the core PHPTemplate engine. Why not using some of the custom engines like Smarty? Smarty is great but I believe performance is really what shouldn’t be overlooked and the richer the template engine is in features the faster it will die under high load. PHPTemplate is just fine for what we do.
Cut to the cheese

Enough said, let’s deal with taxonomy display.