Drupal 6 Themes from Packt Press by Ric Shreves is a remarkably disappointing book.

Many authors have tackled explaining the programming and configuration of Drupal websites, but this is the first book dedicated to teaching users how to make Drupal 6 look and feel like their own.

Out of the box, Drupal is an amazing website creation package; it has features that would take years to “reinvent” if you tried to work from scratch. From a technical, back-end , programmer’s point of view it inspires admiration.

When I put my artistic, designer’s hat on, though, Drupal can leave me nearly in tears. Though version 6 radically simplified and improved the design process over the previous edition, learning to skin a dynamically generated Drupal site is still an order of magnitude harder than designing a static web page. Though it is possible, for example, to use Dreamweaver in parts of the Drupal design process, ultimately your snippets of code and css stylesheets are going to need to be channeled to many different locations that on the site that are not readily viewable in a WYSIWYG environment.

In other words, to effectively give a Drupal site a makeover you need to know everything you’d need to do to design a regular website, plus a wealth of information about the “how” and “where” Drupal needs you to follow to get your vision integrated into its content management system. From a technical point of view, the way Drupal gives granular control of the design process without the need to hack the core code is an engineering marvel. Harnessing that power, particularly given the state of the online documentation is challenging.

It is for that reason that, even after working with Drupal for over a year, I looked forward to Ric Shreves Drupal 6 Themes. It is also why I am so profoundly disappointed by this ill-conceived book.