Fusion a nifty Drupal starter theme

Especially since Drupal 6 arrived, the number of Drupal themes has grown substantially (I started with Drupal 5 - far fewer themes available). But, I've still not found it easy to discover a theme I like, especially for my budget - ie, free!

It's of course possible to create a theme, but doing so from scratch looks daunting to me. So, alternatively, can customise an existing theme. Again, not always too easy I've found - though there are several "starter" themes, which help get you started on the way to creating a theme.

I've looked through various starter themes; tried Zen, and seems they often require quite a bit of coding (notably with css) before you can create something that looks ok.

But also noticed AdaptiveTheme and Fusion, which are starter themes that enable quite a few changes to appearance via selectiong from menus. Looked promising. Both work with Skinr module.

I saw that while they appear similar, AdaptiveTheme has less redundant code. So, gave it a try - but found I couldn't see an option for fluid width. I prefer fluid widths, as figure my users may view on variety of monitors, and I hope my pages will look ok on narrow monitors, albeit better on those that are wider.

So, also tried Fusion - and after just a few selections from menu, I had fluid width design, with fonts and font sizes I'd selected, plus two columns for blocks on the right. (Till now, I'd long had navigation menus etc in one column on the left; but noticed lately that various newspapers have articles on the left, and navigation plus adverts etc on the right - thought newspaper design appropriate to my mainly informative sites, and figured it would have been well researched, plus looks fine to me.)

So if you're looking for a Drupal 6 theme you can customise, maybe give Fusion a try.
You don't even have to follow instructions on creating a sub-theme, when you just try it: instead, simpler and quicker to use the starter subtheme that's included. Then, if it looks promising, can create a sub-theme, and off you go.

Oh, yes - after you've changed the layout etc via theme menu, plus perhaps some of Block appearances via Block configurations (where Skinr module becomes active - adding lots of options that aren't there otherwise), you may want to change colours, spacing and so forth with css. This is more fiddly, but I believe the process is far easier if you use Firebug for FIrefox, or Dragonfly tool with Opera - helping you find what css code applies where, as well as experiment with making css changes without actually changing your theme.

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