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 3. Custom Themes and Zen

We will be covering the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Clearing the theme registry

  • Creating a theme from scratch

  • Creating myzen a Zen-based theme

  • Choosing a CSS layout for myzen

  • Overriding Zen template files with myzen

  • Adding a custom region to myzen

  • Adding a background image to the theme

  • Adding a conditional stylesheet in Zen

  • Modifying myzen's theme settings

Introduction

While subthemes of core and contributed themes are convenient and efficient in modifying and reusing elements of their base themes, circumstances often require a completely unique approach specific to our site. Custom themes are the solution for websites that demand a fresh look, use complex layouts, or require such intricate fine tuning that it would be prudent to start with a clean slate.

Custom themes are the equivalent of handcrafted pieces of art, as the themer controls every piece of the puzzle from a design or implementational point of view. This includes setting up the theme using .info...