The basics of creating a theme

Creating a theme from scratch is quite an in-depth process, and as well as requiring knowledge of Drupal's theming system, we also need to be able to create a design. Because of this, let us simply look at the basics of creating a theme, and how we could create a theme if we have an existing design to convert. There are many resources, listed later, which fully detail and document how to create themes for Drupal. This primer should give you enough knowledge to quickly convert a design you already have into a Drupal theme, provided you have knowledge of HTML and CSS. The full theme documentation should be followed to provide further assistance: http://drupal.org/documentation/theme.

Structure of a theme

Within Drupal a theme is comprised of the following files:

• themename.info (where themename is the name of the theme)

• A number of template files (ending in .tpl.php), containing HTML and PHP which override the default HTML Drupal generates (optional). Common template...