Book Image

Drupal 6 Themes

By : Ric Shreves
Book Image

Drupal 6 Themes

By: Ric Shreves

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.<br /><br />Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system's front and back-end interfaces. <br /><br />Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website<br /><br />Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Drupal 6 Themes
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface

Drupal Modules


Following are the Drupal modules:

Content Construction Kit

The Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a Drupal module that allows for the easy creation of custom content types with custom fields. While this module is not in itself a theming tool, it does allow for more flexible layout of your site. There are a number of options that can be combined to extend the functionality of CCK, making this a very powerful—and widely used—extension.

The Content Templates (Contemplate) module can be combined with CCK to enable easy control of the Drupal teaser and body fields.

Learn more: http://drupal.org/project/cck see also, http://drupal.org/project/contemplate

Devel Module

The Devel module is a suite of tools that are useful to both module and theme developers. This extension was used for several purposes in this book: revealing information about themes, providing dummy content, and identifying recommendations for overrides.

When creating intercepts and overrides, you will find the Theme Developer option particularly useful, as it provides quick access to key information about the templates and functions being used by each page. The Theme Developer option is included with the Devel module, but must be activated separately.

The option to create dummy content quickly and to your specifications is also a real time-saver. No more time wasted, spent creating dummy users, content items, and comments by hand. Again, the Create Content option is included with the Devel module, but must be activated separately.

Note

This extension is intended for use during development and should not be employed on a production site.

Learn more: http://drupal.org/project/devel

Panels Module

The Panels module makes the creation of multi-column layouts a breeze. With Panels, you are able to divide a page into content areas and control the content in each area. Blocks and nodes can be mixed freely.

The system comes with several default 2 and 3 column formats, but you can do virtually anything you want with a little configuration work.

Learn more: http://drupal.org/project/panels

Views Module

The Views module enhances your control over the listing of content items (nodes). With views you can create custom lists that contain the content you want, sorted in the manner you want. Views makes it easy to make blog-site type lists of the most recent articles, most recent comments, top posts in a category, most popular posts, etc.

Learn more: http://drupal.org/project/views