Giving a web designer Drupal is like handing a child an empty paper towel roll and telling them to go play. Some kids look at the tube, turn it over in their hands, and look at you with confusion—or annoyance—as if to ask: “What am I supposed to do with this?” But the creative kids see much more than an old piece of gluey cardboard. With a little imagination, they know that by simply peeking through it, the tube is transformed into a telescope. Suddenly, the playground is now a bustling harbor, and perched atop the slide, they are captaining the most feared pirate ship at William Howard Taft Elementary. Stick a handle through the middle, and it’s a rolling pin. Add a cone to one end and some fins to the other, and it’s a rocket.
Then there’s the kid who uses it to roll up a hundred-foot-long sheet of perforated paper towels and sells it back to you at a premium because it’s “artisan-crafted.” That kid is a born marketer. We’re not going to talk about him. Walk away.
Like the empty paper towel roll, Drupal can both confuse and delight. With more than 15,000 modules, it can be extended to do virtually anything—assuming you have the patience to figure out how. This is what makes the role of a Drupal designer so rare and unique—so much so, in fact, that we don’t call them “designers.” We call them “themers.” Some CMS communities—WordPress, Joomla, or Expression Engine, for example—often separate designers from developers according to who does what with Photoshop files: designers make them, and developers chop them up into HTML, CSS, and code to create a functioning website.
Drupal’s theming system, however, is so robust—that’s developer speak for “overly customizable, complicated, and obtuse”—that it requires a vast array of skills to master, partly because Drupal uses a lot of arrays. (Zing!) Drupal themers work with HTML, CSS, and PHP. They create and chop up Photoshop files. They are designers and site builders, both describing and implementing functionality using Drupal’s vast collection of modules, custom PHP, “hooks,” “overrides,” and all kinds of technical stuff you’ll come to know and love (or loathe).
That’s why this book is so important. Designing for Drupal requires knowledge of both design and code, colors and conditionals, people and processors. So if you’re new to Drupal, welcome! Please ignore the gallows humor in the previous paragraph. Drupal is great! If you’re already a Drupal pro and picked up this book to see how other folks do it, we should get together and do what Drupal experts do best: complain about Drupal.
All kidding aside, Drupal is an amazing platform built and supported by more than 17,000 talented designers and developers. It can power websites ranging from personal homepages and homeowners’ associations to television networks and international publications like The Economist. This book will do more than any other to ease Drupal’s learning curve. It will also introduce you to the Drupal community and its brilliant, opinionated, passionate, and funny themers.
So, read and explore. Be the creative kid on the playground. With a little practice, you can turn that cardboard tube into a microphone. Or megaphone. Or lightsaber. Or an improbably large toothpick.
And when you’re done with your cardboard tube metaphor, please get involved in the Drupal community. Please don’t squander that big, juicy brain of yours in isolation. Share your creativity and fresh ideas. We need you.
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