A new book that teaches users how to create themes for Drupal websites has been announced today by Packt Publishing. Written by prominent open source and Content Management expert Ric Shreves, ‘Drupal 5 Themes’ helps readers create striking new looks for their Drupal websites.

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System, finishing as the overall winner in the 2007 Open Source Content Management System Award. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with exceptional design, means it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS websites. Drupal’s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.

Creating eye-catching and professional themes for Drupal websites can be a daunting task for developers and designers. However with prior knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a dash of creativity, this book will simplify the process by explaining the Drupal theming architecture, the PHPTemplate engine, and also how to modify existing themes and build new themes from scratch.

“One of the things I set out to accomplish with this book, was to create a resource” explains author, Ric Shreves. “In the book, I put together a catalog of the system's 20+ stylesheets and all the default themeable functions. The information is organized logically and will make this a resource people can put on their shelf and turn to when needed. Being able to quickly lay your hands on the information concerning the styles and the themeable functions is a real time-saver,” he concludes.

As an open source project, Drupal is free to download. This means that it survives through volunteers and donations from an enthusiastic community. In a move designed to demonstrate their support and to help provide a source of revenue for the project, Packt is paying the Drupal Foundation a percentage of every book sold. “This is something we do for all open source projects that we publish books on” explains Packt spokesman Damian Carvill. “Our aim is to establish our royalties as part of the service and support business model that sustains Open Source.”

This book will be suitable for anyone who wants to learn more about Drupal themes and for designers of all levels who are trying to get their heads around working with Drupal.