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

Styling the comment form


In this recipe, we will look at manipulating form elements and markup using the Form API in an effort to make styling elements of the comment form easier. To be precise, we will be altering the comment form displayed to anonymous users in order to position its contact fields within a DIV block, thereby allowing us to target them better via CSS.

Getting ready

We will be using the mysite module created earlier in this book to contain an implementation of hook_form_alter(). Since we are going to be working on the comment form, it is assumed that the Comment module is enabled.

Drupal's default permissions do not permit anonymous users to view or add comments. These permissions can be added via the Permissions management page at admin/user/permissions (Home | Administer | User management | Permissions). To assist with debugging, it is also recommended that, if the Devel module is enabled, anonymous users be allowed to access debugging output via its permissions.

Finally...