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I'm developing a web site for a further education college in the UK, using Drupal (6.19). The site won't contain a huge volume of content and the structure is fairly simple.

I understand HTML and I have an reasonable understanding of PHP, SQL and CSS. I've created a sub-theme based on Genesis, but I'm feeling a bit out of my depth.

In your opinion, based on my level of skill, is it best to create a theme from scratch, or should I continue to develop my Genesis sub-theme?

Thanks,

Mike

BoltClock
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unpossible
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1 Answers1

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As a general rule it makes sense to build on top of a starter theme such as Zen, ninesixty, or genesis. Those themes provide considerable functionality that is not worth rewriting. I'm not that familiar with genesis, but the other two provide a CSS reset, skiplinks to navigation for accessibility, SEO-sensitive content ordering, inline edit controls, and much more. Also, as with any piece of Drupal, when problems are discovered and corrected, you can update the base of your subtheme and get the fixes for free. Unless you have specific requirements that can't be met by subtheming, I recommend using a base theme.

keithm
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    I'd also point out Tao (http://drupal.org/project/tao) by Development Seed. This is my favorite "just gets out of the way" base theme. Personally, I feel like Zen tries to do a little too much. – David Eads Dec 03 '10 at 17:09
  • Zen and Genesis look great, but as a CSS beginner I found the inheritance confusing and became bogged down by the complexity of the code. I think I'm going to base the design on an existing template and modify it to work with Drupal, as demonstrated beautifully in this video: 'Tips and Tricks for Drupal Theming: 90 Minute Tutorial' video: http://blip.tv/file/2873247. – unpossible Dec 06 '10 at 10:30