Given the popularity of the PHPTemplate engine, and the extent that it eases the difficulties attendant to theming, it is probably no surprise that few people choose to build their themes without the use of the theme engine. Moreover, pure PHP themes tend to be more difficult to maintain over time and there are fewer help resources available in the Drupal community (as most people employ one of the theme engines). Given the advantages of PHPTemplate, and the drawbacks of building without it, it is very hard to recommend that you build a pure PHP theme; indeed, without some special circumstance, I would recommend against it.

That said, it is possible to build pure PHP templates, without the use of PHPTemplate (or any other theme engine) and in this section we will look at the basics behind this approach to theming, and give you the information you need to get started, should you decide this is how you want to proceed.