Resetting the default theme manually

There will be times where certain changes we have made to the theme will render the site utterly unusable. For example, this can happen when there are layout issues with the theme which might make navigating to the theme administration pages difficult, or when we have introduced an error in our PHP code which leads to the White Screen of Death where all we have to work with is an unusable blank screen. While we could simply stomp our way into the database and change the current theme, the "Drupal Way" advocates a cleaner and simpler solution to rescue the site.

In this recipe, we will be looking at rescuing an unusable site via the settings.php configuration file.

Getting ready

This recipe only applies when a Drupal site becomes unusable due to errors in the theme currently being used.

How to do it...

Since the site is unusable, we can either edit the database directly or use the settings.php file to override the default theme being used, as detailed in the...