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

Customizing the appearance of a particular node type


Drupal's PHPTemplate theming engine uses naming conventions to easily theme nodes. While the standard template used is named node.tpl.php, other naming conventions are available to target specific subsets of nodes. Here, we will be looking at specifically theming content of a particular node type—story—by removing information about its categories and submission fields during display.

Getting ready

This recipe uses the myzen theme created earlier in this book as an example theme. As we are targeting particular node types, it will be a good idea to have more than one node type enabled along with sample content for each.

How to do it...

The following steps are performed in the theme folder, which in this recipe is sites/all/themes/myzen. Zen-based themes store their template files in a templates folder while others might choose to store them in the base folder.

  1. myzen's templates folder should contain a node.tpl.php file. If this is not available...