Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By : Karthik Kumar
Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By: Karthik Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design which, when employed correctly, allows developers to literally handcraft every aspect of a site, so that it looks and performs exactly how they want it to. While it is reasonably straightforward to download a Drupal theme and install it, doing anything beyond that is not. Using custom themes requires familiarity and experience with Drupal's theming system, especially if you want to easily administer and maintain your themes.</p> <p>Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of its extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide which will allow users to take full advantage of Drupal's theming system.</p> <p>This cookbook starts with recipes which address the basics of Drupal's theme system, including 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 content. With the introduction of the Field API and the growing importance of Views and Panels in Drupal 7, chapters have been dedicated to each feature. You will also learn many techniques for dealing with Drupal&rsquo;s templating system, which will allow you create themes which surpass even the existing Drupal and contributed modules.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Understanding the anatomy of a theme


Drupal themes can consist of a multitude of files each with its own purpose, format, and syntax. This recipe will introduce each of these types with an explanation of what they do.

Getting ready

It will be useful to navigate to the Garland folder at themes/garland to browse and view the files inside a typical, fully featured theme. Garland uses the PHPTemplate theming engine which is the default engine in Drupal 7.

How to do it...

The following table outlines the types of files typically found inside a theme's folder and the naming conventions to be followed for some of them:

Type

Mandatory?

Description

mytheme.info

Yes

Configuration file which provides information to Drupal about a theme named mytheme.

*.tpl.php

Varies

Template files which allow the customization and styling of themable aspects of Drupal. These can either live at the root level of the theme or in a folder named templates.

page.tpl.php

Yes

A template file which determines...