Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Book Image

Drupal 7 First Look

Overview of this book

Drupal 7 contains features for which site administrators have been clamoring for years, including support for fields, an improved administration interface, better database support, improved theming, and more. You could of course make a laborious search on sites, blogs, and many online tutorials that would promise to update you about every new feature, but there's an even better way to know all about Drupal 7's new features: Drupal 7 First Look is the first and only book that covers all of the fantastic new features in Drupal 7 in depth and covers the process of upgrading your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7. If you've used Drupal 6 and want to use Drupal 7, you need this book.Drupal 7 First Look takes an in-depth look into all of the major new features in Drupal 7 so you can quickly take full advantage of Drupal 7. It also assists you in upgrading your site to Drupal 7. Some of the new features in Drupal 7 include: Fields API, based on Drupal 6 CCK, which allows you to easily build your own content types Improved user interface for administering your website Built-in support for working with images and files Improved security for the site and users of the site Completely rewritten database layer DBTNG to make working with the database easier and more secure. Improved API for custom module development and user interface theming
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Drupal 7 First Look
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Template changes


Drupal 7 makes several modifications to the files needed to build a theme. These changes are designed to make building themes easier and to make execution faster.

A high quality Drupal theme needs several key files to function properly including a .info file, a page.tpl.php file, a template.php file, .css files, and JavaScript files. Let's look at each of these files in detail. The files for a template are all placed in a directory named for the theme located in the sites/all/themes directory. For example, if we were creating a new theme called Drupal 7 Rocks, we would start by building a directory called drupal_7_rocks within the sites/all/themes directory. Now we can start to add files to that directory to start building the theme.

Everything there is to know about .info files

The .info file tells Drupal about your theme including the name of the theme, a description for the theme, and the .css and JavaScript files that make up the theme. Let's look at the Garland.info...