Help with Drupal

[Sgt.Romeo9]

Hi everyone

I'm very new with Drupal so I do apologize if my questions sound a bit silly to some of you.
A friend of mine asked me to help him change the colour scheme, pictures, buttons etc... on his website, most of the changes revering to the look of the website.

Now since I don't know Drupal at all what I thought I would do is rename the Index.php to Index2.php and place an under maintenance page in it's place labeled Index.php
Download all the .CSS files do all the changes I need to do manually and re-upload them. Swap out all the pictures he wants changed with new ones etc...
When I'm done simply delete the Index.php and rename the Index2.php back to Index.php

Now I realize Drupal has a maintenance mode built into the back end, the problem is he doesn't have super admin rights to the site and he can't get hold of the people who developed the site for him.

What I would just like to know is: Will any of these steps I've mentioned above back fire on me? When I swap the Index.php pages back in the end will the website run as it previously did, or will the installation of Drupal be triggered? Does Drupal have a double authentication on the code so that when I manually change the code the website will break because the code in the back end doesn't match the code I changed etc... or should I be able to do this without any problems?

Thank you very much in advance for any help with this. Once again sorry if I sound like I don't have a clue about Drupal, it's because I actually don't lol

 

[GarethC]

I haven't worked on drupal in a while, but you're just going to be editing one of the themes surely?

There's no need to put a maintenance index.php or anything in, unless you specifically want to. But just download the theme's folder and edit the CSS and images you want, reupload the folder and you're good to go.

Also, if you have ftp access, do you also have access to the database? Cause then you can always reset the admin password.

 

[rward]

or create a child theme and do all your changes in there as you go along.