Chapter 6. Modifying an Existing Theme

In this chapter, we will put together the various techniques that we have covered and demonstrate how to modify and heavily customize an existing theme. The majority of people who get into Drupal themes tend to do so by modifying other themes and learning from them; and that's exactly what we're going to do in this chapter.

We will take an existing theme, look at how it works, then copy it and modify it until we have a very different looking theme. In this case, we will be building a fixed width, CSS-based, personal blog theme.

For the purpose of illustrating the examples in this chapter, we start with the Zen theme, which you can download from the Drupal site.

Setting Up the Workspace

There are several software tools that can make your work of modifying themes more efficient. Though no specific tools are required to work with Drupal themes, there are a couple of applications that you might want to consider adding to your tool kit.

I work with Firefox...