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

Finding the right function to use to theme an object


In the previous chapter, we saw how to find out which theme function is being used to theme an element—the username—in a page and, subsequently, learned to override it. However, while writing modules, or when we are looking at ways to render data loaded from the database, it is also not uncommon to be at a loss to know which function to use to theme a Drupal object.

In this recipe, we will look to source potential solutions which can be used to render a typical Drupal user object. We will be accomplishing this task using the Devel module and available documentation.

Getting ready

The Devel module which can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/devel is assumed to be installed and enabled. Furthermore, it is required that the access devel information and execute php code permissions be assigned to the current user.

The Development block which is provided by the module, also needs to be enabled.

How to do it...

Since we are looking to theme...