Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By : Karthik Kumar
Book Image

Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

By: Karthik Kumar

Overview of this book

<p>The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design which, when employed correctly, allows developers to literally handcraft every aspect of a site, so that it looks and performs exactly how they want it to. While it is reasonably straightforward to download a Drupal theme and install it, doing anything beyond that is not. Using custom themes requires familiarity and experience with Drupal's theming system, especially if you want to easily administer and maintain your themes.</p> <p>Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of its extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide which will allow users to take full advantage of Drupal's theming system.</p> <p>This cookbook starts with recipes which address the basics of Drupal's theme system, including 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 content. With the introduction of the Field API and the growing importance of Views and Panels in Drupal 7, chapters have been dedicated to each feature. You will also learn many techniques for dealing with Drupal&rsquo;s templating system, which will allow you create themes which surpass even the existing Drupal and contributed modules.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 12. Rapid Layouts with Panels

We will be covering the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Using Panels to create a front-page layout

  • Embedding content in a panel

  • Styling a panel with rounded corners

  • Creating custom styles with the Stylizer module

  • Changing the layout of a panel

  • Creating a custom panel layout

  • Replacing the site contact page with a panel

Introduction

The Panels module is, at its heart, a visual tool for layout design. Layered on top of this core is a sometimes overwhelming myriad of features and suite of modules that give a new meaning to flexibility and ease of use. In this chapter, we will be concentrating on the layout and theming aspects of this module.

Panels are useful for everything from creating complex landing pages such as the front page of a site, to overriding system pages and replacing them with a custom layout. Besides being used to lay out the content of a page, they can just as easily be embedded within nodes or even within other panels. This enables us to design...