[UPDATE: 10/16/2008] I take back most of what I think about the Zen Theme.  The more I poked around, the more I “got it”.  Great job by the guys at Lullabot.

I’ve taken the last week and a half exploring Drupal. Some people say it’s the Cat’s Meow, but I say that it still needs a lot of work.

Some general thoughts using Drupal 6

• Keep the modules to a minimal. The fact that 32 MB is not enough memory for a PHP script(s) to invoke is mind boggling. Less modules mean a smaller memory footprint. It will also help with installations on shared hosting providers.
• Sometimes it is okay to statically program stuff into a block.
• If you can build it in PHP yourself then do so.
• Separate the site theme from the admin theme.
  • What I did was set my site theme to a Zen sub-theme and set the admin’s theme Garland.
  • Install the Administrators Menu Module which put the administration menu in a compact, horizontal overlay
  • In the menu management interface, sub-tend the Create Content menu items into the content management menu
  • In the admin theme, got to blocks setup and eliminate the left hand-side navigation menu and adminstration menu from the left hand block. Use the admin menu module (above) as your main navigation.

Thoughts on using the Zen Theme as a starter theme for your Drupal site

This drives me nuts:

The CSS layout method used in the core Zen theme is based on the mostly undocumented “Border Politics” layout method.

Why wouldn’t you document this shit? Drupal already suffers from too many CSS files (css files are arbitrarily added by the modules) and the “best starter theme” doesn’t document it’s own?

There are several themes you need to pay attention to:

• Layout.css (either fixed-width or flexible) – It contains most of the positioning information for styles. When I say most, well, it can’t contains everything.
• [theme].css – overrides the base themes settings. What kills me is that you have no idea what needs to be overridden so you have to keep two stylesheets open and copy and paste between them—and then that doesn’t even control the base-system css styles as well. In the end, they recommend to just copy the zen.css file from the zen theme and rename it your theme.css
• html-elements.css – Why isn’t this included in the STARTERKIT? Why do the Zen developers think that their base html styling is what I want?

Overall, this experience has taught me that it was probably best to just roll-your-own, but I had spent too much time so I decided to keep barreling through.