Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Overview of this book

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.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Uploading a new favicon


This recipe details the steps involved in changing the favicon displayed with the theme. A favicon, dubbed as a shortcut icon in the Drupal interface, is an image which is particular to a site and is displayed in the address bar of the browser next to the site URL as well as the browser tab. It also makes its presence felt if the site is bookmarked in the browser as in the following screenshot:

Getting ready

We are going to need the icon file to be added which is recommended to be of size 32x32 pixels or higher. An example icon file named favicon.ico can be seen in the misc folder in the Drupal installation.

How to do it...

Adding a custom favicon to the theme can be done by performing the following steps:

  1. Navigate to admin/build/themes (Home | Administer | Site building | Themes).

  2. Click on the Configure link next to the theme in question.

  3. Look for the Shortcut icon settings fieldset.

  4. Within, uncheck the Use default shortcut icon checkbox as we want to use a custom icon.

  5. Using the Upload icon image field, browse and select the icon file in the filesystem.

  6. Finally, click on the Save configuration button below to upload and save the changes.

How it works...

The uploaded file is saved in the Drupal filesystem and the path to the icon is registered as a theme setting in the database. When a page is being rendered, the Drupal theme system designates this .ico file as the favicon for the site.

In the following screenshot, we can see the logo image added in the previous recipe also being used as the basis for a favicon:

There's more...

Besides manually uploading the icon file via the theme's configuration page, other options exist to perform the same task.

Alternative methods

Alternatively, instead of uploading the icon file via Drupal, use the Path to custom icon textbox to point to the icon file on the server. A third option is to place the icon file in the theme's folder and rename it favicon.ico. Provided that the Use the default shortcut icon field is checked, the theme will automatically look for this file in its folder and use it as its favicon. Not specifying a favicon will result in the site using Drupal's default icon, Druplicon, instead.

Tip

Other formats besides the ICO format are also supported by some, but not all browsers. More information is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon#Browser_support.