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

Analyzing variables using the Devel module


While working with the Drupal API, we will often be faced with the situation where we have no idea how a variable is structured. While PHP provides a number of functions to peek into the variable, Drupal's Devel module provides a cleaner solution and a prettier interface to do the same.

In this recipe, we will be looking at the Devel module's dpm() function.

Getting ready

It is assumed that the Devel module has been installed and is enabled. It also comes with its own set of permissions and it is assumed that the current user has all the appropriate permissions including access devel information.

We will also be making use of the mysite module created earlier in this book to hold our odds and ends.

How to do it...

The following steps are to be performed inside the mysite module folder at sites/all/modules/mysite:

  1. 1. Open the file mysite.module in an editor.

  2. 2. Look for an implementation of the mysite_init() hook. If it is unavailable, create one...