Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a website to fit your needs. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done right, allows developers to customize every aspect of the site. Although it might sound easy to customize the look of your site, it's not a cakewalk to build custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of Drupal's extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide, which will allow users looking to theme their Drupal sites to do so by taking full advantage of Drupal's theming system. It covers numerous aspects from creating custom themes to using the powerful CCK, Views, and Panels modules to create rich designs that are easy to administer and maintain.Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book will guide readers through most important aspects of Drupal theming. It starts off with recipes dealing with the basics of Drupal's theme system: you will find recipes for solving all your problems with 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 the content that is output on a page. A substantial number of recipes are dedicated to Drupal's template system, which will provide you with a solid foundation in order to override the output of Drupal and contributed modules. Furthermore, as the combination of modules such as CCK, Views, and Panels is so widely prevalent, chapters have been dedicated for each of these modules. With this book, you'll learn to get the most out of Drupal's templating system and its modules to create rich designs for your site.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Creating a custom panel layout


The myriad of layouts that the Panels module comes packaged with are usually sufficient for most requirements. That said, themers wanting to display content using more interesting and complex layouts can also roll their own. While it used to be the case that custom panel layouts needed to be added in as a plugin, this is no longer needed.

In this recipe, we will make use of the Panel module's Layout designer to create our own custom layout designed for a page requiring a lot of regions.

Getting ready

It is a good idea to sketch an outline of our layout either on paper or in a graphics editor to get an idea of what we want prior to fiddling with the layout designer. For example, the layout that we are looking to create in this recipe will be based on the rudimentary sketch in the following screenshot which was created using Microsoft Paint.

How to do it...

Create an empty panel page named blurbs with particular care taken to choose Flexible as its layout during creation...