On Theming

One of the common things about the web design and development industry is the fact that most of us started doing what we do by accident. It was often something that got picked up along the way as a hobby, like maintaining a blog... and it turned out we were good at it and we eventually made it a job.

And inevitably, as you start doing a job that once was your hobby, you have less and less time, and less and less desire to work upon your own personal site. I honestly can't remember the last time I had a layout on any blog that I've run that has been totally custom... I think I must have been in high school or maybe my first year of college.

And tonight, I'm sitting here debating on what to do with the theme of this site... I like the theming I'm using, but I want to make a change... but what?

The thing about Drupal is that it's not a blogging platform. Oh, sure, you can totally use Drupal as a blog site and many of us do... but that's not the overall direction Drupal went as a project. Drupal's a robust content management system... It's the sort of thing that's chosen for newspaper websites, social networking sites and sites about how to hold Congress accountable. That being said, many of the Drupal based sites out there aren't home grown DIY projects, they were paid for by companies and organizations to be built.

Thus being the case... One of the places where Drupal has always been severely deficient is in the theming department. There are very view themes on drupal.org's theming section, most of them are minimalistic and several of them are more base starter themes than anything else. The theming I'm using now probably is one of the most stylish of the contrib themes.

I don't know about anyone else working with Drupal in a themer's capacity, but I've never contributed any theming work publicly because, for one, I'm too busy being paid to work on custom themes for other people... Thus what I'm working on for work generally isn't the part of the site that can be contributed back to the community... if I wanted to do that theming wise, I'd have to do a whole separate project. Secondly, contributing a blog theme seems sorta useless when it seems like the system isn't really used much for blogging, so it feels partly like a waste of time... It probably isn't, but it feels that way. I'd rather spend my time contributing documentation because that's likely to get used.

I've been sitting here debating what I want to do about my theming situation with my blog... I could port a WordPress theme over... They have a rather vibrant theming community because the themes actually do get used, but it seems like if I'm going to put that sort of effort in, I'd like something custom... but I'm no designer. So, if anyone's for hire to make so mockups for me, let's talk.