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 2. Beyond the Basics

We will be covering the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Understanding the anatomy of a theme

  • Creating a subtheme based on a core theme

  • Overriding base theme elements in a subtheme

  • Changing the screenshot image of a theme

  • Including a CSS file in a theme

  • Enabling CSS optimization

  • Creating the mysite module to hold our tweaks

  • Adding a CSS file from a module

  • Displaying a different theme for each day of the week

  • Creating a fresh look using the Color module

Introduction

One of the more prevalent adages with respect to Drupal development and theming is:

Do not hack core!

Modules, themes, and other files that come with a stock Drupal installation should never be edited directly. In other words, we really should not need to modify anything outside the sites folder of our installation as it is designed to contain all our changes and customizations. The reasoning behind this is that most, if not all, aspects of core are accessible and modifiable through a clean and non-invasive process...