<h2>Theme Goals</h2>
<p>Improving your sites theme can help you to acomplish many goals. In particular, improving your site's theme can help with the following business goals:</p>
<ul><li>help drive traffic to your site</li>
<li>highlight products for sale on your site</li>
<li>provide information to your site visitors</li>
<li>help your sites visitors to colloborate with each other.</li>
</ul>
<p>This purpose of this themes help documentation is to help you accomplish the following theme development goals:</p>
<ul><li>make small design changes without having cross browser compatibility issues</li>
<li>implement designers wireframes in your theme</li>
<li>pick a base theme to customize</li>
<li>build a new theme based on an existing theme</li>
</ul>
<h3>Improving theme help in Drupal</h3>
<p>In a recent survey of Drupal administration user experience respondents indicated that theming was the most difficult Drupal administration task. We conducted a series of interviews to learn more about themers goals and the tasks that need to complete when developing a theme.</p>
<h2>Basic Drupal theme tasks</h2>
<p>Which ever theme you choose to work with you will need to know how to accomplish some basic theme tasks.</p>
<ul>
<li>Find and open a Cascading Style Sheet(CSS) file for your theme</li>
<li>Copy and paste CSS code</li>
<li>Learn the CSS attributes in your theme</li>
<p>It is recommended you use the Firefox browser with developer toolbar and the view formatted source extensions. We also recommend you use <a href="http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html">Eric Myer's standard CSS class names</a>.</p>
<li>Change colors</li>
<li>Use part of another theme. For example, copy the CivicSpace Admin theme into your sites theme.</li>
<li>How to build a new layout on top of an existing theme. E.g. change number of columns, header and footer positions, fluid versus static body.</li>
</ul>
<h2>Difficult theme tasks</h2>
<p>We have identified a number of difficult theme tasks that require explanation. Some tasks are both basic tasks and difficult tasks and must be further documented to explain the difficult portions of these tasks.</p>
<ul><li>CSS Layout development</li>
<li>Identifying a good base theme to start with</li>
<p>We have added categorization capabilities to the project module which will allow themes to be categorized.</p>
<li>Alter an existing theme</li>
<li>Learn CSS classes and IDs</li>
<p>It is recommended you use the Firefox browser with developer toolbar and the view formatted source extensions. We also recommend you use Eric Myers standard CSS class names.</p>
<li>How to add padding or margins to a class</li>
<li>Remove text and images from the theme UI. E.g. Remove submitted by, which may or may not be a theme issue.</li>
<li>How to fix forms that are too difficult by default.</li>
<li>Fix xHTML from modules that cause the theme to display incorrectly</li>
<p>An issue should be filed against the module. Include a picture of the incorrect display, how it looks in a basic theme like box grey. Provide a snippet of the offending xHTML from the module and indicate what the desired xHTML should look like.</p>
<li>Working with PHP variables.</li>
<li>Abandoning fixed width and working with containers</li>
<li>Working with complicated fullheight designs or something flexible that needs lots of max-width and min-width to be done right.</li>
<li>Inserting cool graphical effects designers want that will also work in Internet Explorer.</li>
<li>Internet Explorer and Firefox compatibilities</li>
<li>Write a theme from scratch</li>
</ul>