One of the – small – downfalls of Drupal is the lack of a really nice built-in administration interface.  When you install Drupal, by default the admin area uses the same theme as the main site, and if you’ve a site with heaps of columns, or one that is just plain old thin, your admin interface will be a dog to use.  Rootcandy is an excellent admin theme for Drupal that is easy to use and will ensure your site building is a breeze.

So, how do you go about installing it?  It’s as easy as this:

1. Download the theme from http://drupal.org/project/rootcandy (it’s for Drupal 6 only at this stage)

2. Unpack it and upload to your Drupal themes directory.  For the purposes of being a neat freak, i’ve set up a folder for it at /sites/all/themes/administration – just pop the rootcandy folder in there, and move onto the next step.

3. Log in as an administrator, and browse to http://yoursite.com/admin/settings/admin.  Select ‘Rootcandy’ (or the other Rootcandy variants!) from the dropdown, click ‘Save configuration’ et voila – you now have beautiful, and very easy to use admin interface.  When your visitors arrive to visit your site, don’t worry – Rootcandy will be replaced with your default site theme.

This is one of the great things about Drupal, the ability to specify an administration theme as well as a default layout for the main site.

Heres a screenshot of the Rootcandy theme, as nicked from the developers site at http://sotak.co.uk. Enjoy!

Drupal 6 has come on in leaps and bounds since I first had a look at it a few years ago.  It’s now powering new projects i’m working on, including Shares.ie, Competitions.ie, and Ewine.ie.  I’ve used the wonderful oDesk to outsource some of the work, and have a contractor integrating Keiths excellent css layout for Shares.ie into a Drupal 6 theme.  Tonight, however, I thought i’d spend an evening multitasking by watching the excellent Munster-All Blacks match, whilst at the same time having a go at integrating Keiths Competitions.ie design into a Drupal theme myself.

It was actually surprisingly easy!  One of the reasons I like Drupal is due to the development metholody behind it.  There is a core base of code, which modules and themes can be built on top of.  Instead of hacking away at core code when you’d like to change the layout of code or how it is rendered, Drupal has a cascading system of overrides which allow you to create copies of the templates or other elements you wish to override, and edit these to override the core templates (which still exist, untouched).

It’s a more foolproof way of ensuring if you run into difficulties, or you wish to upgrade the core code, it won’t get messy, and you’ll be able to debug quite quickly if anything horrible happens.

Anyway, creating a theme is as simple as this:

1. Make a new folder for your custom theme, preferably in /sites/all/themes/custom/yournewthemename.
2. Create a .info file and name it accordingly e.g. yourthemename.info – it defines the name of the theme, location and name of the stylesheets, any js elements, define areas for navigation areas, content blocks, and special functions (search box, logo, etc).
3. Create a page.tpl.php file – this is your phptemplate file where the layout (or wrapper) of your site is defined.  It’s easy to create, and well documented.  This is also where you add in some quick code to render the content blocks and navigation areas you defined in the .info file.
4. Add your style.css file – as mentioned above, you can call the file anything, but if you’ve not defined the name of your stylesheet in the .info file, Drupal presumes it’s called style.css.
5. Log into your admin area, browse to the themes management area, and switch on your theme – it’s that easy!

Obviously, you’ll need to spend a bit of time fixing small layout issues if you’re a perfectionist, but you can have your basic theme ready in less than half an hour.  To override elements like breadcrumb output and blocks output, you can just copy the .tpl files from a ready-made theme (zen is usually good!), place them in your new custom themes directory, and hack away.

Easy!

Santa is being very nice to Compare.ie so far this year.  The site soft launched about two and a bit months ago, we’re up to about 20k unique visitors per month, and it’s growing increasingly quickly.  Just checking the stats (i’m a statsaholic!), so far this month the site is up 340% from last month.  Happily, i’m seeing lots of returning visitors, and about 1,500 people have opted to receive our ‘Money saving deals’ newsletter.

A consumer forum will be launching within the next couple of weeks, as well as proper broadband / tv / credit cards / mortgages / insurance channels.  It seems to me the recession is a great time to start a business, especially when you’re in the business of saving people money!