Adding and Customizing Themes CHAPTER 5 (Com web hosting)
Adding and Customizing Themes CHAPTER 5 Drupal themes are the place where the worlds of graphic artists and programmers meet. A theme is a collection of files that defines the structure, style, and, to an extent, the behavior of your site. Themes use HTML code for the structure, CSS and images for the style, and PHP for determining behavior to give your site its look and feel. Drupal has four themes as examples in the core distribution, and Drupal.org offers a number of contributed themes, ranging from completely finished solutions that are ready to be installed and used to those intended as clean starting points for your design efforts. This chapter will show you how to download and install new themes. You will then see what components come together to be a theme, what template files look like and how they work, and how you can override themable functions to change the HTML that is being generated by your site. You will also learn how to create your own template files and how to make entire themes that are based on only CSS. Finally, I will recommend some modules that are helpful when theming a site. Understanding Themes Themes have two main responsibilities: providing the CSS and image files that are involved with your site s visual design and, if needed, overriding the default HTML output that is generated by Drupal s core files and modules. When customizing the look of your site, most of the work will be done at the CSS level, and this is therefore the theme s most important task. You can get an overview of your installed themes by navigating to administer . themes (admin/themes). The four themes that come with the Drupal core distribution are Bluemarine, Pushbutton, Chameleon, and Marvin. The contributed themes repository on Drupal.org (http://drupal.org/project/Themes) is a great source for attractive and interesting themes. Figures 5-1 through 5-4 illustrate several different contributed themes showing the same content. At this level, the concept of a theme is clear. It is a look and feel for a site that the administrator can activate. Themes are a tool for keeping the separation between content and appearance clean. Content is stored in the database, and the theme decides how to present it.
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