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Drupal’s block system is far from ideal. It was designed back in the threecolumn-era, was improved to work beyond three-columns-content-in-middle layouts, but is still unsuited for more complex layouts.

If you want real complex layouts, you will have to turn to Panels, or Panels2. Or so they say.

A client of mine, a large Dutch media company uses Drupal for all its new sites -about four, five each month-, and untill today used panels in these sites.

Luc van Braekel recorded the Drupal Devroom on FOSDEM 2008. De presentation by Morten (aka King of Denmark) and me is uploaded to google video. De presentations are uploaded tp slideshare and can be downloaded below.

Together with Morten, one of the best Drupal themers, I will give an introduction in Theming for Drupal-6.

So, if you aer interested in theming for Drupal in general, or Drupal6 in specifics, make sure you pop in at the Drupal-developers room.

At the first Dutch DrupalJam, I gave my workshop theming
Below, you can find the slideshow and the resources for the live demo, The presentation is Dutch though. You can also find the presentation (and more) on slideshare, so you can re-use, or embed it on your own site.

During the workshop a lot of sites about CSS passed by. Below you find a shortlist of the most important CSS resources.
For a more comprehencive overview, you can see my CSS tag on Simpy.

When creating a theme or design for your site, you should test your CSS designs on several browsers. First thing, off course, is to make sure your CSS validates. Second thing is to make sure it renders good on Safari, Opera or Konqueror, for they are the only browsers that are truly standards compliant when it comes to CSS. The good thing is that these are available on Mac and Linux. But both do have problems with running Internet explorer. And as we all know, IE is not particularly good at rendering your well designed CSS properly. So you will need to test and debug your designs on IE

update: after some stupid editing of mine, I brought the points down to six. thanks to Bert for telling me I am fool.

More and more often I have to cope with designers in the process of creating Drupal sites. That is a good sign: Drupal matures, so it gets used in more multitalented, professional environments. Not just a pimpled student in the attic who knows some Photoshop and some Javascript and learns some PHP, but project cycles with multidiscplinary teams involved.

The biggest bottleneck, in all this, however, I find, is the wrongly skilled designer.