After just completing my first Drupal theme created from scratch, it was a big learning curve trying to style certain aspects of the content, especially some of the Views generated content but that’s a discussion for another day. Wrestling with the different settings and style sheets included with modules took a bit of time and although it’s only a basic theme, I  was quite pleased with it. After completing this and fighting with the code to a certain extent, I was curious what changes would be made to theming in Drupal 7 after the involvement of Mark Boulton and the whole D7UX project.

I only downloaded the Drupal 7 Alpha at the weekend so not had much of a chance to have a really good look around but first impressions indicate that the code has been cleaned up a lot since Drupal 6 which should certainly make it easier for designers/themers to create beautiful and custom designs. I think one of the major things which has held Drupal back in comparison to other systems like WordPress and Expression Engine is the lack of high quality themes for Drupal, and there seems to be a barrier for non-developers within the Drupal community and a lot of designer v developer debates going on, but that’s for another time.

One of the best additions was the stark theme which is almost totally devoid of CSS which helps when installing modules to determine their included CSS and see the CSS easier. Having this is a great help as one of the things I found difficult at times was altering the module’s CSS and by removing this it will certainly make this process easier in development.

As a result of this, I’ve decided to alter it slightly and remove even the basic styling that it has and also conver this theme to HTML 5 in order to have as clean an install as possible for creating themes in the future. I’m hoping that once I’ve completed it I’ll be able to release it for others in the near future, which should give me incentive to make it as good as possible.