I went to a Drupal trainingsession yesterday at the University of Antwerp. I was familiar with the concept but I hadn’t seen it in action yet. (Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website. “http://drupal.org/about“)

Some technicalities were somewhat confusing to a mere designer as myself, yet I found myself wanting to know more afterwards. Especially the “theming” options triggered my imagination. In Drupal 6 they have opened the door to styling without having to write a single line of php. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds promising. There is also a “theme developer module” called Devel to assist you. (firebug for drupal).

Zen is the theme that was suggested by the speaker to get started with. It is thoroughly documented and perfectly suited to start exploring the realms of Drupal. The xhtml is semantically correct and it is supposed to be highly modifiable through CSS. The name zen is an homage to the famous CSS -showcase zengarden.