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Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Chapter 2. Beyond the Basics

We will be covering the following recipes in this chapter:

Understanding the anatomy of a theme
Creating a sub-theme based on a core theme
Overriding base theme elements in a sub-theme
Changing the screenshot image of a theme
Including a CSS file in a theme
Enabling CSS optimization
Creating the mysite module to hold our tweaks
Adding a CSS file from a module
Displaying a different theme for each day of the week
Creating a fresh look using the color module

Understanding the anatomy of a theme

Drupal themes can consist of a multitude of files each with its own purpose, format, and syntax. This recipe will introduce each of these types with an explanation of what they do.

Getting ready

It will be useful to navigate to the Garland folder at themes/garland to browse and view the files inside a typical, fully featured theme. Garland also uses the PHPTemplate theming engine which is the most commonly used and recommended engine across Drupal's core and contributed themes.

How to do it...

The following table outlines the types of files typically found inside a theme's folder and the naming conventions to be followed for some of them.

Type	Mandatory?	Description
`mytheme.info`	Yes	Configuration file which provides information to Drupal about a theme named mytheme.
`page.tpl.php`	Yes	A template file which determines the layout of all Drupal pages.
`node.tpl.php`	No	A template file which determines the layout of a node inside a Drupal page.
`block...`

Key benefits

Take control of the look and feel of your Drupal website

Tips and tricks to get the most out of Drupal's theming system

Learn how to customize existing themes and create unique themes from scratch

Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

Description

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a website to fit your needs. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done right, allows developers to customize every aspect of the site. Although it might sound easy to customize the look of your site, it's not a cakewalk to build custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of Drupal's extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide, which will allow users looking to theme their Drupal sites to do so by taking full advantage of Drupal's theming system. It covers numerous aspects from creating custom themes to using the powerful CCK, Views, and Panels modules to create rich designs that are easy to administer and maintain.Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book will guide readers through most important aspects of Drupal theming. It starts off with recipes dealing with the basics of Drupal's theme system: you will find recipes for solving all your problems with regions and blocks. It then moves on to advanced topics such as creating a custom theme and using it to modify the layout and style of the content that is output on a page. A substantial number of recipes are dedicated to Drupal's template system, which will provide you with a solid foundation in order to override the output of Drupal and contributed modules. Furthermore, as the combination of modules such as CCK, Views, and Panels is so widely prevalent, chapters have been dedicated for each of these modules. With this book, you'll learn to get the most out of Drupal's templating system and its modules to create rich designs for your site.

Who is this book for?

This book is written for Drupal developers who want to refresh the look and feel of their sites. If you are a Drupal site administrator who is looking to go beyond the basics and customize the presentational aspects of your Drupal site, then this book is for you. It assumes that readers are familiar with rudimentary PHP and acquainted with Drupal installation and general usage. Readers are also expected to have knowledge of CSS and XHTML.

What you will learn

Beef up your knowledge of the basics of Drupal theming such as installing and enabling a downloaded theme, changing the logo, and adding a slogan to the theme

Customize the look of your website by configuring and extending your existing themes with sub-themes

Create custom themes from scratch for websites that demand a fresh look

Use the PHPTemplate theming engine to override module output and style it using a theme

Style and manipulate the content of your website by adding CSS and JavaScript files via themes and modules

Use the ImageCache module to manipulate images on the fly

Jazz up the design of your site by incorporating JavaScript elements

Make your Drupal site stand out from the crowd by customizing Views via the theme layer

Design complex site layouts rapidly with Panels

Speed-up development and debugging with Drupal tools such as the Devel module

Customize your Drupal site in a creative style by making thorough use of Drupal s APIs

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Paul Crisp Mar 22, 2013

I've tried quite a lot of Drupal manuals and this is definitely the best I've found. Theming is a bit of a dark art with multiple interacting components. The Cookbook covers a lot of territory but does so very clearly. It also manages to show exactly how to accomplish something AND explain what your doing and how it works. Probably not geeky enough for a Drupal Master and does require a bit basic knowledge about php and CSS but a good allrounder could cope fine with this. Recommended

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Geoffrey G. Hankerson Feb 10, 2011

In Drupal or any Web development environment, the themer's job is to make the site look nice. This might mean making a Photoshop mockup into a real site, or implementing a design in another way. A themer is expected to use CSS, JavaScript and some Php to make this happen.This cookbook offers recipes to help the themer do his job. The recipes start simple with tips on how to download a contributed theme from Drupal.org and install it. The recipes then quickly move to show you how to make a custom theme from scratch or using Zen as a base theme. One recipe walks you through the components of a theme step by step so you can get started on your own theme. The recipes build from there.Some of the other basic recipes I like include: customizing a node template for a specific node type, including a CSS of javascript file in a theme, and optimizing CSS and Javascript for production sites.I also really appreciated the fact that the author encourages the use of a custom module for theme customizations. A lot of themers get caught up in working their theme's directory only and never realize the advantage of using a module to add javascript to a specific page, change a form submit button into an image, etc... (The advantage is the code is more easily reused on another site).What I especially like about the book is the fact that there are several good recipes for experieced themer's like me in addition to basic recipes. Some of the more advanced tips I looked included using Firebug's console.trace for JavaScript debugging, making Php variables available to JavaScript, and even a simple example of a Views Style plugin. I've been wanting to learn to make views style plugins to expose some of those cool jquery effects out there in the wild. This gives me great starting point.The one thing I wish the book would emphasize more is most of implementing a theme still is writing CSS. Often the point of a fancy theme preprocess function is to add a CSS ID or class to some part of the markup so we can target it properly with CSS. This is however a small gripe.This cookbook along with "Front End Drupal" are an essential part of any Pro Themer's library.

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook: Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes

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