How an absolute beginner like me made his own Drupal 8 theme ?
Intro ;
In this blogpost , ill tell you a bit how I succeeded in building my very own Drupal 8 theme from scratch in around 5 days … while i only knew HTML commands on Day 1.
On a quick note , pre-requirements for building a Drupal 8 theme from scratch is knowing HTML , CSS and basic twig commands.
My main challenge was CSS and that's how i proceeded ;
Cascading style sheets commonly known as CSS is a styling language used to give your website a look …
In contrast to what I believed some days back , CSS is not a programming language since it does not solve any particular problem or perform any particular task such as addition or subtraction !!!
Instead , it is a stylesheet language which allows web developers to describe the presentation of documents written in MARK-UP language such as HTML .
How I learned the CSS basics real quick ?
Some ten years back , it would have maybe taken weeks if not months for someone to understand what CSS really is and how it actually works
Thankfully , we today have a number of wonderful and inordinately passionated programmers who help complete beginners metamorphose into actual developers through their super comprehensive YOUTUBE videos …
You guessed it right … I LEARNED like 90% of all CSS i know from youtube or precisely from here
Travesty media ‘s crash course for absolute beginners proved to be extremely helpful as through its innovative teaching method defined by learn by doing ( my personal opinion), i started to become more acquainted to the following ;
- Add background colour to my site
- Specify font size
- Add /remove margin as required
- Add/remove paddings as required
- Add image
- Use borders
- Style the borders …. etc
P.s ; i know that all of that is very basic stuffs but i proved to be really really helpful to create to create a very basic Drupal site
I complemented this crash course with important information which i got from ;
- w3schools which can be accessed here
https://www.w3schools.com/css/
This particular website helped me experiment with CSS codes i had real difficulty in understanding …. For instance , i understood how border-radius actually works from there
Personal advice ; Take a pen and a piece of paper and make notes , notes and again notes up till u understand it … And yeah … make drawings and all … i made a number of small squared boxes before grasping the “padding” concept xD.
Other sources ;
Once i understood how CSS stuff works , i watched part of the series on building a Drupal 8 theme from scratch from watch and learn on YouTube .
This whole series on Drupal 8 theming is just INCREDIBLE as it not only teaches you the steps to take but equally explains WHAT you are actually doing !!!
I equally used this very interesting source which made things clearer for me
I also checked documentation from the following sources ;
Thats a bit how i prepared myself for this challenging but most importantly enriching task .
Personally i think that building a basic Drupal 8 theme is not difficult at all if you follow the above listed steps.
HOWEVER , it will take you much much much more time to be able to build complex themes with amazing features because all that i listed above are just the basics … Just the beginning of a creative adventure …
To sum up ;
Summary of all my leaning sources ;
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfoY53QXEnI&t=4542s
- https://www.w3schools.com/css/
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOV8VNTAvek&list=PLUBR53Dw-Ef818EUxzNoWKcQ7PYUXpFFA
- https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/theming/twig
- https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/theming
P.S ; I did use out some other videos and documentations but i did not keep track of them all sorry … but yeah these account for the most of what i used….
As conclusion ;
I prepared myself for like 2 -3 days before started coding my theme but since i had good foundations , i quickly coded and styled the theme in a very basic way though xD
Yeah … i did miss out on many hours of sleep but it was superrr fun and what i gained surely outweighs the lost sleep … Thanks for you reading guys … Bye Bye …
