Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Book Image

Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a website to fit your needs. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done right, allows developers to customize every aspect of the site. Although it might sound easy to customize the look of your site, it's not a cakewalk to build custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook provides a plethora of recipes that enable Drupal template designers to make full use of Drupal's extensibility and style their site just the way they want it. It is a well-rounded guide, which will allow users looking to theme their Drupal sites to do so by taking full advantage of Drupal's theming system. It covers numerous aspects from creating custom themes to using the powerful CCK, Views, and Panels modules to create rich designs that are easy to administer and maintain.Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of tasks, this book will guide readers through most important aspects of Drupal theming. It starts off with recipes dealing with the basics of Drupal's theme system: you will find recipes for solving all your problems with 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 the content that is output on a page. A substantial number of recipes are dedicated to Drupal's template system, which will provide you with a solid foundation in order to override the output of Drupal and contributed modules. Furthermore, as the combination of modules such as CCK, Views, and Panels is so widely prevalent, chapters have been dedicated for each of these modules. With this book, you'll learn to get the most out of Drupal's templating system and its modules to create rich designs for your site.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Uploading a new logo


Most websites incorporate a logo into their design, usually accompanying the site name in the header. For example, the Drupal logo or "Druplicon" in the following screenshot represents the default logo displayed for every core theme that comes packaged with Drupal.

These logos tend to play an important role in the branding and identity of the site and are frequently an important facet in the overall design of the theme. This recipe details the steps involved in changing the logo displayed in a theme.

Getting ready

The new logo should be in a suitable format and should balance quality with size. The usual rule of thumb is as follows:

  • PNG: For high quality images which contain transparencies.

  • JPEG: For detailed photographic logos which do not involve transparencies.

  • GIF: For simple line-art.

How to do it...

Adding a custom logo to a theme can be done using the following steps:

  1. Navigate to admin/build/themes (Home | Administer | Site building | Themes).

  2. Click on the Configure link next to the theme in question.

  3. Look for the Logo image settings fieldset. Within, uncheck the Use default logo checkbox as we want to use a custom image.

  4. Using the Upload logo image field, browse and select the logo file in the filesystem.

  5. Finally, click on the Save configuration button below to upload and save the changes.

How it works...

The uploaded file is saved in the Drupal filesystem and the path to the logo is registered as a configuration setting in the database. During display, the theme uses this setting to embed the logo within the Drupal page. The following screenshot displays the Bluemarine core theme with its default logo replaced with a custom PNG.

There's more...

Besides specifying the logo file via a theme's configuration page, there are other avenues which can also be pursued.

Directly linking to image files

Alternatively, instead of uploading the logo via Drupal, use the Path to custom logo textfield to point to an existing logo file on the server. A third option is to just place the logo file in the theme's folder and rename it as logo.png. Provided that the Use the default logo field is checked, the theme will automatically look for this file in its folder and use it as its logo.