Posted May 15th, 2008 by Some Random Nerd

This site is a constant work in progress; I'm tinkering around with one thing or another at any given time.

One of the things I set out to do with my first blog was to provide the information that would have been useful to me when I started out. So I'm going to continue that aim here by chronicling the process of building the site that I'm building. (Which feels a little bit meta, but there you go.)

Right now, I guess this is something like a 0.1 release, in that it's using a theme and template that I've built pretty much from scratch and am revising on the live site. (Which is one of those things that you should never do... but what the hell. Right now, I'd rather have a site that's occasionally flaky than hold back and have no site at all.)

I say I'm building from scratch- it's using the ATCK template to start out with. I'm not really sure whether it's more hassle to start a "blank slate" theme from scratch or to take an existing theme and then modify it's code, but this seems the easiest way to start from a blank slate.

There are a number of blank slate themes out there, but this is the one that seemed to make the most sense with the way that I work. Any time you build any theme- even a "blank slate" theme- you have to make choices; if you start out with an assumption that a plain white background is the blankest slate possible, then you're still left with a situation where someone who wants a white-on-black scheme needs to check through for every colour that's set to ensure that it's still visible- in other words, you're making it harder for someone to make that choice further down the line.

You're also making choices about how to organise your code- while it's easier to write code arranged by the different blocks etc., it might be easier to adjust the code when it' arranged by attribute (ie. all the colour settings together, all the font sets together and so on.)

But if you start from nothing, then there's a lot of work that needs to be done just to start a page with the right Drupal elements in the right part of the HTML code before you even get to making decisions about layout, colour schemes and what colour should go with what element.

Apparently the ATCK (Advanced Theme Constructor Kit) is a modification of a theme that was a modification of the Zen theme, so there's kind of an open source pedigree there, in that the idea of there being an "original author" is pretty meaningless. So that's my blank slate; I've put a basic shell of a page together, and I've got my design idea that I want to build my site around; nothing too fancy to start with; just a picture in the header and an idea for a 3 column layout.

So, the first thing is to put together a template for the HTML page, with the appropriate hooks for Drupal to put it's content into. This is a file called page.tpl.php. Luckily, there's a neat tool to generate this basic skeleton of the template.

So for a while as there are, believe it or not, more important things in my life than building my own website (like working on other people's websites), this might go a bit funny from time to time, and might change here and there without rhyme nor reason, I can assure you that the site is here to stay- which means that it should be constantly improving. I aim for every visit to be more rewarding than the last, so I hope that you find that to be the case.

See you later...