Over 100 clear step-by-step recipes to create powerful, great-looking Drupal themes

• Take control of the look and feel of your Drupal website
• Tips and tricks to get the most out of Drupal's theming system
• Learn how to customize existing themes and create unique themes from scratch
• Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible

In Detail

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.

A collection of recipes that cover all aspects of customizing and developing unique Drupal themes

What you will learn from this book

• Beef up your knowledge of the basics of Drupal theming such as installing and enabling a downloaded theme, changing the logo, and adding a slogan to the theme
• Customize the look of your website by configuring and extending your existing themes with sub-themes
• Create custom themes from scratch for websites that demand a fresh look
• Use the PHPTemplate theming engine to override module output and style it using a theme
• Style and manipulate the content of your website by adding CSS and JavaScript files via themes and modules
• Use the ImageCache module to manipulate images on the fly
• Jazz up the design of your site by incorporating JavaScript elements
• Make your Drupal site stand out from the crowd by customizing Views via the theme layer
• Design complex site layouts rapidly with Panels
• Speed-up development and debugging with Drupal tools such as the Devel module
• Customize your Drupal site in a creative style by making thorough use of Drupal's APIs

Approach

Written in cookbook style, this book offers solutions to all common theme design problems through recipes. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by the analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The book is designed so that you can read it chapter by chapter, or you can look at the list of recipes and refer to them in no particular order.

Who this book is written for

This book is written for Drupal developers who want to refresh the look and feel of their sites. If you are a Drupal site administrator who is looking to go beyond the basics and customize the presentational aspects of your Drupal site, then this book is for you. It assumes that readers are familiar with rudimentary PHP and acquainted with Drupal installation and general usage. Readers are also expected to have knowledge of CSS and XHTML.