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 4. Templating Basics

We will be covering the following recipes in this chapter:

  • Changing the structure of a page using template files

  • Customizing the appearance of a particular node type

  • Customizing the appearance of a specific node

  • Theming made easy using the Devel module

  • Theme overrides using the Theme developer module

  • Styling the site maintenance page

Introduction

Drupal's design stresses the separation of logic from presentation with the former being handled by modules and the latter by themes. Theme functions commonly those that are prefixed with theme_ and theme template files act as a bridge between the two as they are designed to be overrideable. All theme functions and template files are tracked by Drupal's theme system and cataloged in a theme registry. Modules and themes are expected to declare their theme functions and templates through the use of a function named hook_theme(). This function is parsed for each module and theme and the resulting registry is cached in the database...