This is in continuation to my previous article about why I choose Drupal as the CMS for my home site. It is quite some time that I have been using Drupal and now right time to pen down about my impression and experience. Though, I haven't tried any other CMS and it can be argued that when I haven't tried any other CMS how I could be sure that this is one of the best one's around. On the other hand, I never felt like switching to another CMS or felt that I need another CMS which in itself proves the power and diversity of Drupal. No issues, easy to use, easy to maintain, easy to extend the functionality, etc. In a nut shell, I would like to say I am happy with Drupal.

The dark theme

For about 2 years, I have been using the the classic theme zen. A simple, elegant and impressive theme. One fine day, I came across this site called Blackle and its motto truly won my heart - design web pages to save energy. Don't miss their fantastic motto and about them, read about it here. I started hunting for a real dark Drupal theme and my search ended as I came across this wonderful theme named as Colourise. Big thanks to the guys for making it available for community. I did some small changes in the default.css to show another image in the top content pane. I joined the default background image with the photo of my girl and it appears quite personalised now.

Technically, migrating from one theme to another is just a matter of choosing another theme in the administration section. But once I migrated to Colourise (a theme with dark background) from zen (a theme with a white background), I realised that migration from one theme to another takes more than that. Besides the simple differences like I couldn't use a customised logo, the biggest difference was that all the images on the site looked out of sync. After changing the theme I realised that most of the images had white background which made them appear out of place. I realised that it is always a good idea to put the images with transparent background so that there is no issues in case of changing the theme. I have already changed most of the images to have transparent background and hope to finish all the transformation in following couple of days. Changing the backgrounds of the photo and video albums required changing the background colour in the corresponding JAlbum project and rebuilding them.

Customisation

To ease migration to newer versions and in the spirit of maintainability, I prefer using the default configuration and customisation as far as possible. Well, I choose a different theme, Colourise, to suit my taste and in terms of additional modules, I use taxonomy menu in order to organise my articles under respective categories. Installing a new theme or module is as simple as downloading a tar-ball from the site and extracting it contents to the respective directory - themes in case of a theme and modules in case of a module. Though for the various needs there are thousands of modules out there to choose from and similarly thousands of themes to apply to your site. For the enthusiastics, there are wealth of resources and references available to get you started in order to tweak a functionality or implement a totally new one.

References

• Drupal Sites Network - Latest showcase, featured Drupal sites.
• Drupal Developer’s Toolbox - Drupal developer's toolbox at smashing magazine.
• Drupal Modules - Search, rate and review Drupal modules.
• css Zen Garden - The beauty in css design. Must look for the designers.