Book Image

Drupal 5 Themes

Book Image

Drupal 5 Themes

Overview of this book

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways. Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Drupal 5 Themes
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Appendix A

Chapter 6. Modifying an Existing Theme

In this chapter, we will put together the various techniques that we have covered and demonstrate how to modify and heavily customize an existing theme. The majority of people who get into Drupal themes tend to do so by modifying other themes and learning from them; and that's exactly what we're going to do in this chapter.

We will take an existing theme, look at how it works, then copy it and modify it until we have a very different looking theme. In this case, we will be building a fixed width, CSS-based, personal blog theme.

For the purpose of illustrating the examples in this chapter, we start with the Zen theme, which you can download from the Drupal site.

Setting Up the Workspace

There are several software tools that can make your work of modifying themes more efficient. Though no specific tools are required to work with Drupal themes, there are a couple of applications that you might want to consider adding to your tool kit.

I work with Firefox...