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

Introduction


In a bid to separate logic from presentation, Drupal's theming system tries to minimize the amount of PHP that is necessary in a template file. This ensures that themers who are not as comfortable in a PHP environment, are not exposed to the nitty-gritty of complicated code manipulations. Instead, they are provided with a host of pre-prepared variables which contain the content of the body of the page, the blocks, the sidebars, and so on—depending on the nature of the template—or those that describe other elements of the page such as user details or submission information which can be utilized in the template file.

But the question arises: Where do these variables come from? And how can they be modified? This is where preprocess functions come in. Prior to the execution of every template file, Drupal calls a set of functions known as preprocess functions which insert, modify, and in general, organize the variables which are available for use in the file. Furthermore, as we saw...