(Tips) Generate your own Drupal themes

Tips : Generate your own Drupal themes

Artisteer has been generating some buzz lately. With this (Windows-only, as of this time) software, you can generate unlimited static XHTML/CSS, Wordpress, Joomla, and now with the $129.95 "Standard Edition", Drupal themes.

This could be an exciting way for theming, a historically challenging endeavour for new and experienced Drupallers alike, to be within reach for many more users.

The premise seemed a bit hokey at first after watching their demo — Artisteer doesn’t ‘come with’ themes, it generates them from random or assembled collections of combinations of different aspects of your theme, such as:

• Layout
• Color scheme
• Header
• Background images
• Typography
• Article styles
• Block styles
• Buttons
• Menu
  

Generating random styles
Clicking the "Suggest Design" button repeatedly, I had a parade of theme after theme, with layouts and text styles and colors changing before my eyes! A particularly neat feature is that you can isolate this random generation to any sub-section of your theme. Perhaps one of the designs catches your eye but the header and button styles are totally wrong. So, you just click "Suggest Buttons" and everything else stays in place while the buttons randomize.

After playing with the random themes for a while, digging in a bit further revealed an astonishing amount of options. I can see how you could be lost in this for hours, endlessly tweaking things like button corner radius, gradient parameters, and block title spacing. It’s a control freak’s dream.

Artisteer gives you many nice touches that have historically been lacking from Drupal themes compared to other CMSes, such as icons for node links and styling for tables, bullets, and blockquotes.

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Courtesy:- Topnotchthemes.com