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

Introduction


The Panels module is, at its heart, a visual tool for layout design. Layered on top of this core is a sometimes overwhelming myriad of features and suite of modules that give a new meaning to flexibility and ease of use. In this chapter, we will be concentrating on the layout and theming aspects of this module.

Panels are useful for everything from creating complex landing pages such as the front page of a site, to overriding system pages and replacing them with a custom layout. Besides being used to lay out the content of a page, they can just as easily be embedded within nodes or even within other panels. This enables us to design and implement complex layouts virtually at the click of a few buttons.

The previous screenshot illustrates a typical panel layout. In the screenshot, Top, Left side, and Right side represent regions within the panel. Each region can contain an unlimited number of panes which are not restricted in what they can contain. For example, the Top region contains...