As we start talking about theming sites, I have to say that I haven't been a terribly big fan of the default Garland theme. Part of this may be the simple fact that using the default theme for any system puts the user at risk of building a site that looks like everyone else's site. In the last couple of days, my thoughts are starting to change on this, as I've found a couple of sites that are based on this theme that, with some tweaking to the header and the colors, actually look pretty good.

Setting comments about Garland aside, there are many downloadable themes available. One of the most interesting might be the newly released Zen theme. Billed as "the ultimate starting theme for Drupal 5," the new release seems very promising. While early versions had a little bit too much that needed to be stripped out to be a good starting point, the current release is about as bare-bones as you can get. Firing up the STARTERKIT sub-theme yields a site that doesn't even have columns until the layout files are applied.

I really think that someone already skilled and confident with their CSS skills would probably like using this theme as a starting point, so let's walk through the process of installing and enabling it.

As with my modules example, please visit the Zen theme page and make sure you're getting the latest version.

mkdir /webdocs/sites/all/themes
cd /drupal/5.x/themes
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/zen-5.x-1.0.tar.gz
tar -C /webdocs/sites/all/themes -xzf zen-5.x-1.0.tar.gz

This theme also takes advantage of the Theme Settings API module, so let's grab that one, too...

cd /drupal/5.x/modules
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/themesettingsapi-5.x-2.7.tar.gz
tar -C /webdocs/sites/all/modules -xzf themesettingsapi-5.x-2.7.tar.gz

Navigate to /admin/build/modules and enable the Theme Settings API, then go to /admin/build/themes and enable the zen theme. You can also enable the STARTERKIT theme and check that out. For help in building your own custom sub-theme, view the README.txt file in the zen theme folder. Once a theme is enabled, you can go to its configuration page and fine tune the settings. Thanks to the Theme Settings API, this theme has a few more settings than most themes would have.

If you're not into designing your own theme, you can browse all of the available themes on the Drupal web site. Installation will be the same for all of them. At the opposite extreme, you can start a new theme completely from scratch by reviewing the PHP Template documentation.

And so we're reaching the end of this series. In my next entry, we'll finally discuss some options for fixing the contents of your site's front page.