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

Finding the right function to use to theme an object


In the previous chapter, we saw how to find out which theme function is being used to theme an element the username in a page and subsequently, learned to override it. However, while writing modules or when we are looking at ways to render data loaded from the database, it is also not uncommon to be at a loss to know which function to use to theme a Drupal object.

In this recipe, we will look to source potential solutions which can be used to render a typical Drupal user object. We will be accomplishing this task using the Devel module and available documentation.

Getting ready

The Devel module which can be downloaded from http://drupal.org/project/devel is assumed to be installed and enabled. Furthermore, it is required that the access devel information and Execute PHP Code permissions be assigned to the current user.

The Development block which is provided by the module also needs to be enabled.

How to do it...

As we are looking to theme...