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

Overriding Zen template files with myzen


Zen subthemes, by default, use the page, node, and other template files directly from the base theme. In other words, we do not need to specify template files in our myzen theme unless we are looking to change the template.

In this recipe, we are going to override the base theme's page.tpl.php template file with our own copy and make changes to it. As an example, let us see whether we can reposition the status messages element which is usually represented by the $messages variable.

Getting ready

We are going to assume that the myzen subtheme is already created and available.

How to do it...

The following steps outline the procedure to import a template file from the base theme to the subtheme:

  1. 1. Navigate to the sites/all/themes/zen/templates folder that contains the default templates.

  2. 2. Copy the page.tpl.php file.

  3. 3. Paste it into the equivalent folder in the subtheme, namely, sites/all/themes/myzen/templates.

  4. 4. Within the subtheme, open this file...