Complex Layout

Yes I ported the design from an HTML comp, so yea I build the actual Drupal theme.

I think you mean Genesis, which I also built. Difference to Zen, hard to say really, many differences, horses for courses you might say. I never liked some things about Zen so thats why I built my own starter theme. I'm a horse who would rather run his own course. I believe that Genesis is easier to theme and most certainly out of the box Genesis has way more layout options. It has accessibility features that no other theme has and Gpanels, which no other theme has either.

To build your theme you will need to start with a clean starter theme like Genesis - no style is the beauty of it, its a blank slate to style as you please, which is a lot easier than hacking away at a styled theme (which you need to unstyle first).

You need to dig into the documentation for Genesis (links are on the project page) which will clearly show you all the layout options.

Ok, where to start... hmmm, let start with the content management, theme can wait, thats the least important bit really, getting the "output" sorted out first is most important.

You will want several additional modules:

• CCK + Emfield, Filefield, Imagefield and Imagecache
• Views, Nodequeue and Panels.
• Pathauto and global redirect

From what I can tell there is only one content type - which would include the normal title and body fields, and to which you would add an Imagefield, and Emfiled external media field (for the videos) and possible some other fields if you need them.

You need to make a taxonomy, I would structure it like this:

Body
-- Natural Health
-- Spas
-- Yoga
-- Fitness
-- Nutrition
-- Practitioners
mind
-- Mental Health
-- Meditation
-- Self-Improvement
spirit
-- Spiritual Wellbeing
-- Buddhism
-- Practitioners
-- Retreats

Then add the content type you created earlier to the taxonomy so you can select which category the node is placed into. These taxonomy terms will be invaluable for building lists of categorised content (either pages or blocks).

Next you will want to start creating some content, but first you need to make the pathauto settings for your content type and taxonomy terms, so you can match your current URL's so you won't loose any back-links.

Taxonomy will automagically build pages of categorised content, so everything tagged with "Retreats" will appear in its own section and so on. To radically modify this page to become a custom landing page we need to turn to theming - and use a page-taxonomy.tpl.php template file OR we can use Panels to intercept taxonomy term page and build the custom layout with Panels.

I would probably use a blend of the two, and use templates and Mini panels. In this way I can gain the full power of the theme system for my layout and block placement (and other things) and get the advantage of "context" that panels provides. "Context" is easy to understand - basically it means the Mini panel will know what the taxonomy term is for the page you are viewing, and can "pull" related content with the same term.

Ok, so now we have a taxonomy, some categorised content and a layout for the taxonomy term pages (worry about the homepage later).

Next we want to show some extra blocks on the taxonomy term landing pages, such as the /mind page. This is really easy , either use the blocks system in Drupal or the Mini panel configuration to place blocks into the mini panel columns.

Maybe you want to build some contextual views to display related content in taxonomy term pages or on nodes (based on the category). Use Views to do this, and use the taxonomy term as the argument.

Now, perhaps you want to display a list of featured items, probably in a block or a view, and you want to control very precisely which items appear and in what order - you can use Nodequeue for this, its a very powerful module and easy to use.

As you will note I have skipped a lot of details, its really not possible for me to go into details without writing an entire book, and in any case those details already exist in these forums or tutorials on many other sites, for example I wrote a short tutorial similar to this (but only for a homepage, yours is more comlex requirement) http://adaptivethemes.com/take-control-of-your-homepage-with-nodequeue-v...

Someone else will probably chime in with some good ideas for you also.