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

Creating myzen, a Zen-based theme


While building a custom theme from scratch is great, most themers prefer to use starter themes as the base for their designs. Starter themes save time and effort as we do not have to perform tedious repetitive tasks and can rely on a tried and tested structure to use as a foundation for our theme.

In this recipe, we will be looking at creating a theme based on the most popular of all starter themes available on drupal.org, Zen.

Getting ready

Download the theme from http://drupal.org/project/zen and install it following the instructions in the first recipe from Chapter 1, Drupal Theme Basics.

How to do it...

The Zen theme provides a starter kit which can be used to kick-start our theme.

  1. Navigate to the newly installed Zen theme's folder at sites/all/themes/zen. Copy the STARTERKIT folder inside it.

  2. Paste this folder into sites/all/themes. Rename the folder to the name of our new theme which, in this case, is myzen.

  3. Within this folder, rename the file STARTERKIT.info...