Welcome to Drupal 6 Themes. This book is an updated and expanded version of our Drupal 5 Themes title. Not only has the content been updated to reflect the changes in Drupal 6, but it has also been expanded to include new examples, together with more information and resources.
The goal of this book is to explain the principles behind the Drupal theming system and to provide a reference work for theme developers. The book provides an explanation of the Drupal theme framework and shows how you can use it effectively to manage the presentation of your site. Throughout the text, we illustrate key points by demonstrating practical solutions to common problems.
The book begins with an overview of the default theming system and how you can squeeze the most out of it. In the middle sections, we discuss how to execute more extensive modifications by directly working with Drupal's theme functions and styling. In the latter chapters, we discuss more advanced topics, like how to make the site's presentation layer responsive to the users or the content and how to build templates from scratch.
As the PHPTemplate engine is now so closely integrated with Drupal, we tend to focus on techniques that rely on PHPTemplate. We devote little space to building themes with alternative template engines or directly in PHP. Also, as this work is concerned with the presentation layer of your Drupal site, we do not cover creating new modules or writing custom functionality.
Please note that the author comes from a design background and that many of the explanations and rational reflect the author's background. In that light, this book may not always satisfy hardcore programmers who expect the technical issues to be explained in detail. This book should, however, make the life of many designers a little easier. We also hope that the extensive reference materials included in this book will allow this title to find a lasting home on the shelves of many Drupal developers.
Chapter 1 examines the working of the theme system in Drupal, and the different approaches to working with Drupal themes.
Chapter 2 takes a look at all the various theming options that are available in the default Drupal system. By way of example, we take a default theme and customize it using only the options provided by the system.
Chapter 3 will cover how the PHPTemplate theme engine works and how you can use this powerful tool.
Chapter 4 identifies all the themable elements in the Drupal system and tells you where to find the elements together with an explanation of their functions.
Chapter 5 will cover employing of intercepts and overrides to modify the default styling in your Drupal theme.
Chapter 6 takes a look at how to implement extensive modifications to a default Drupal theme. This is a hands-on example of the techniques covered in previous chapters.
Chapter 7 examines how you can build from scratch a new theme employing the PHPTemplate theme engine.
Chapter 8 takes a look at how the Drupal system enables you to vary the styling between sections, pages or users.
Chapter 9 covers the styling of forms in Drupal, one of the more complex areas in the system.
Appendix A is an inventory of the contents of all the stylesheets in the Drupal system.
Appendix B is a listing of tools and extensions that make your work with themes easier and more efficient.
Throughout this book, we will assume that you have the following package installed and available:
Drupal CMS (version 6.x)
The main requirements of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity! Though this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
.title {
color: #666;
font-size: 1.8em;
line-height: 2.0em;
font-style: italic;
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) { if (!empty($breadcrumb)) { return '<div class="breadcrumb">'. implode(' > ', $breadcrumb) .'</div>'; }
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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