Hook form alter saves the day..

As a site builder and themer, the biggest work for me is usually developing the theme for the project. But manipulating forms is tricky too.

I can build out a site, at the very least the basics, pretty quickly, but the design conconcted by the deisgner can take a bit longer.

But it's amazing what you can do with CSS, tpl files [especially in Drupal 6].

But then you hit a form - and of course - it has to look different from what Drupal outputs.

Hook_form_alter to the rescue. It lets you change just about anything about a form by using the function in your own module.

I'm building out a site, including Ubercart, at the moment. The client requested many small changes to the default look of the forms .. hide this, make this mandatory, move this up and that down, make that wider.

But no problem, hook_form_alter was up to the task. A small mini module to get things going. DSM($form_id) to find out the exact name of the form. DSM($form) to find out what I had to work with.

A few trips to the documentation to see what could or could not be done.

And youre' done!