Skinning Drupal – changing the colour scheme for your blog with CSS Edit

I had a go at changing the look and feel of the blog tonight. I quite liked the original ‘X-template’ look, but wanted to have a go at changing the colours.

The obvious changes were to alter the header images – look in the themes folder and navigate to ‘pushbutton’ and all of the images used in the theme are here. However, much of the drupal site depends on cascading style sheets… and this needs opening in an application such as CSS Edit – there you will see a huge number of items to change, and by working through the source code for the page you will see what class or style is attached to each element. You can then locate that in CSS Edit pretty easily and alter the colour values.

I found the ‘Digital Colour Meter’ in the Utilities folder pretty useful here too! (That is the Apple Mac ‘Applications/Utilities’ folder… nothing to do with Drupal)

Any thoughts about colour schemes welcome – it shouldn’t take too much to alter again now I can see how it all hangs together!

Thanks to Matthew Eaves for the prompts on getting started with this!