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

Theming made easy using the Devel module


The Devel module provides functions and tools that aid both module and theme developers. While it is entirely fine to develop sites without it or related modules such as Theme developer, they are highly recommended as they save time and effort and will eventually prove indispensable. This recipe will outline the setup process and relevant features of the Devel module.

Getting ready

The Devel module can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/devel. Once downloaded, install and enable it via the module administration page.

How to do it...

From a themer's point of view, there are two primary features of importance that are provided by the Devel module. The first is the development block that can be enabled from the block administration page at admin/structure/block [Home | Administration | Structure | Blocks]:

In the pictured development block, the most frequently used option is usually Empty cache. Clicking this link will empty Drupal's caches as...