Using a Drupal theme in a standalone PHP web application

Question

We are using Drupal alongside several standalone PHP/MySQL web apps. Although they are external, we want them all to have the same appearance in terms of HTML layout and CSS. We basically just don't want to have to do separate design work for Drupal and for the web apps. When we update a block or a menu in Drupal, we want the changes to appear automatically in the web apps.

For many reasons, we want to keep these apps standalone. Would it be possible to get them to "pull from" one of our Drupal themes, so they look just like our main Drupal site, without actually being part of it? Anyone have experience with this?

Answer 1

http://drupal.org/project/theme+engines

Look at

Smarty theme engine

By djnz on the 2nd of December, 2004 A theme engine that allows you to use template files written using Smarty Template Engine syntax.

The 'default' template for this engine is box_grey_smarty, which is ported from the original box_grey theme.

And

Haml (Theme engine)

By evil_marty on the 3rd of November, 2009 Haml theme engine for Drupal.

Requires you to download phpHaml, extract to the themes/haml folder and presto. Don't forget to use *.haml on your template filenames.