Colleen Carroll's blog

Back in June I wrote about how to theme correctly in Drupal (Sustainable Markup: How to be a themer in Drupal). At that time I was working on a new website for Graycor, a leading provider of construction, maintenance and facilities services throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. So much of what I wrote about in my last blog entry relates specifically to the newly launched (August 25, 2008) Graycor site.

We set 3 goals for ourselves before we started the prototype build out:

1. Avoid using tpl.php files where ever possible.
2. Create default CSS styling and reuse as much as possible, "Theme" don't "Skin"
3. Leverage the Drupal admin everywhere we could.

And we did just that. We succeeded in reaching our 3 goals on this site.

Let me break down for you what we did...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we could be doing things better and not just in the Drupal way. But Drupal is what I’ve decided to focus on first. I’ve been wracking my brain over how we can improve our process, how we can build more efficient sites faster and better for the client, and how we can give ourselves a tool kit.  And then it hit me, we’ve been approaching designs in Drupal all wrong this last year. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t do anything "wrong", we just didn’t make it easier on ourselves.

We’ve been a Drupal shop for over a year now and we are definitely still maturing our Drupal approach. We are still cutting our teeth, so to speak. And I think that we may be reinventing the wheel all too often.