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

Changing the layout of a panel


Plans are seldom perfect and during the development of a site, there is an inevitable stage where things are chopped and changed leading to a lot of wasted time and effort. The Panels module, however, eases these concerns due to its modular nature, making nudges, tweaks, and even large-scale modifications relatively pain free.

In this recipe, we will be looking at changing the entire layout of a panel from a Two column stacked layout to a simpler Single column layout. Since we are effectively losing a column, we will see how the module allows us to intelligently merge the content from the two columns into the single column.

Getting ready

We will be using the frontpage_dashboard layout created earlier in this chapter to serve as an example panel in this recipe.

How to do it...

Navigate to admin/build/pages (Home | Administer | Site building | Pages) and locate the frontpage_dashboard panel. Click on its Edit link to perform the following steps:

  1. Click on the Layout...