Aug
18
Drupal – Uglier than a monkey's armpit
Garland, drupal's default theme.
Out-of-the-box, drupal is responsible for some of the least attractive websites in existence, and rectifying this matter is a costly and time-consuming proposition.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “look and feel are subjective”, “undesign is the new design” – these are the kind of progressive platitudes one pays lip-service to, up to a point. That point would be when you first install drupal and see a website rendered in Garland…. a Pauline epiphany hammered home as you begin manically switching through the core theme set in the hope of finding, oh, I don’t know, a diamond in the rough. Something that, given a little TLC, a little tweak here and there, might be massaged into something you could reasonably present to your boss as “a draft proof of concept” without entailing the risk that she will regurgitate her lunch over your keyboard.
Drupalistas, for reasons we will come to later, are for the most part software geeks, and have been reminded repeatedly by their parents from an early age that looks are not important. In my heart, I know they are right; morally right. At the same time, none of this mushy stuff is going to fly with marketing. Or the corner office.
Perhaps you prefer Marvin?
Not to worry, of course. That’s what designers are for.
And this is where the problems begin. I’m not talking about the usual kind of designer/developer impedence that we’re all used to. You know what I’m referring to – a designer with no grasp whatsoever of usabilty conventions let alone actual front-end development is given the job of redesigning a website. They lock themselves in a warehouse with a giant canvas and begin tipping bright primary colours all over, in the manner of Jackson Pollock, before driving and skidding over said canvas with various farm implements and forms of transporation before finally stripping themselves naked and crawling over their masterpiece so as to become fully at one with their medium. Finally, their work complete, they photograph the canvas, upload it into photoshop and send it you as a PSD. Job done.
No, I’m talking about a more subtle impedence that emerges in those few web / marketing groups that are actually committed to positive collaboration viz.
Or Bluemarine, perhaps? C'est tres joli, n'est pas..? Mais non.
Developer: You’ve put a “see more” link in a block title.
Designer: I’ve done what?
Developer: You’ve put a see more link here, next to the news feed title.
Designer: Yes.
Developer: Well, the “see more” is part of the block body, not the title.
Designer: Oh?
Developer: So you’ll have to move it.
Designer: I think that’s where people will expect to see it.
Developer: You’ll have to move it.
Project Manager: Is there any alternative?
Developer: (looks pained) Well, I suppose I could try and over-ride it in the theming layer… but then, if we ever want to change theme… or when we upgrade… it’s hacky…
Project Manager: (to designer) Can we move it?
Designers sometimes think that Drupal gives you have a bunch of little UI building blocks that you can move around as you wish. This is half-true, but it’s the other half that’ll burn you: the building blocks are actually stuck together and isolated in little piles. In Drupal, you have the node stack which is all the pieces of a node teaser or page but they are all pretty much stuck together. You have the block stack. The view field and view style plugin stack. The form stack. And so on.
Within one of these stacks you have some freedom, but try to move something from inside one to another… Good luck.
- Young Hahn, Limitations of the Drupal Theme Layer
The Public Internet Channel. Looks great! And I think we can all agree that the result was absolutely worth all the time the developers spent hitting their heads repeatedly against the fake pine fascia of their desks
There’s another issue too, and that’s that drupal theming* is an esoteric art form only fully understood by seven people in the world, and all of them are accomplished backend developers. Which is a problem if you like to split off front-end and back-end development roles, and ironic given that the purpose of any templating system is to separate content from presentation. The result is that to be a competent drupal themer you need to have an excellent grasp of HTML, CSS and possibly jQuery, plus drupal development and the quirks of its theming capabilities – and aesthetics. Such people are few and far between and command salaries commensurate with the laws of supply and demand.
This being the case, you will spend a good amount of time and money making sure your drupal site looks nothing like, well, a drupal site.
You will then wonder if it was worth the effort.
A thought that will be later be confirmed when you decide to upgrade to the next major version, whose framing layer will have been completely retooled.
Before you say it, there are a host of reasons why it is thus: the theming layer needs to accomodate a highly modular framework, for example, and the fact that most developers can’t distinguish Klee from Kandinsky.
Ultimately, however, “the man”, “the suits”, the marketing executives and so forth don’t actually care why the site looks crap. They will not be swayed by arguments such as “yes, it looks crap, but the modular framework means that we can add a crap looking poll module tomorrow without even having to touch the theming layer! Probably.” In fact, they just care that the URL on their business cards and resume points to a page that looks like it was designed for colour-blind Romulans, while their kid’s wordpress blog looks, well, pretty good.
Further Reading
* sic; yes, it’s called theming and not templating. This follows another drupal pattern which is to never use an existing term when a new one will do.
