Drupal 5 Themes

Create a new theme for your Drupalwebsite with a clean layout and powerfulCSS styling

Ric Shreves

Chapter No. 3"Working with Theme Engines"

In this package, you will find:

A Biography of the author of the book A preview chapter from the book, Chapter NO.3 "Working with Theme Engines"A synopsis of the book’s contentInformation on where to buy this book

About the Author

Ric Shreves

is a partner in water & stone (

www.waterandstone.com

), a webdevelopment company that specializes in open-source content management systems. Heworks primarily as a consultant and business systems analyst and is currently on extendedassignment with Peace Dividend Trust. He lives in Bali with his wife Nalisa, one dog,two cats, three turtles, and a mind-boggling number of fish.First and foremost, I thank my loving wife Nalisa for her support and patience. It would also be remiss of me to fail to acknowledge myfriend (and editor at ComputerWorld) Stefan Hammond, who providesmore than a modicum of support and encouragement—together withmuch-needed reality checks.

Drupal 5 Themes

Create a new theme for your Drupalwebsite with a clean layout and powerfulCSS styling

This book sets out to explain the workings of the Drupal theme framework, and how youcan use it effectively. The goal of this book is to explain basic principles, demonstrate practical solutions to common problems, and create a reference for theming.The book begins with an overview of the theme system and an explanation of what isincluded in the default Drupal distro. We next look at how you can squeeze the most outof the default system. The middle chapters discuss PHPTemplate and introduce usingthemeable functions and manipulating the Drupal style sheets. To illustrate the principles,we take a common theme and modify it. In the final chapters, we delve into creatingthemes from scratch and more advanced issues, like forms.For purposes of this text, we focus on the theme engine included in the default distro— PHPTemplate. Similarly, we only touch on creating themes in pure PHP, without the useof a theme engine.This book is all about controlling the presentation layer of your Drupal site; accordingly,we do not cover creating new modules, or writing custom functionality.The author of this text comes from a design background and has only basic programmingskills. The explanations given, and the rational for many of the choices, reflect theauthor's background. In that light, this book may not always satisfy hardcore programmers who expect the technical issues to be explained in detail. It should,however, make the life of many designers a little easier and hopefully, with the referencematerials we've included, find a lasting home on the shelves of many Drupal developers.