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

Introduction


Drupal relies on a core menu component which provides a framework allowing modules to create and customize navigational elements. These can subsequently be exposed via the theme by way of menus embedded either directly within the theme or as content within blocks. Furthermore, this framework forms the basis for the breadcrumb navigation which is an integral facet of every site's user interface.

Besides menu items exposed by modules, Drupal also provides an optional Menu module which allows the customization of the aforementioned items as well as the creation and management of new user-defined menus and their constituent menu items. Customized menu items are not solely restricted to the domain of the site and can also be linked to external URLs if necessary.

As a site's complexity grows, so does its menu structure. Consequently, simple and static menu implementations no longer suffice and other alternatives are required. One of the solutions frequently arrived at is the introduction...