Drupal 6 Themes

Ric Shreves

Chapter No. 8"Dynamic Theming"

In this package, you will find:

A Biography of the author of the book A preview chapter from the book, Chapter NO.8 "Dynamic Theming"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 web developmentcompany that specializes in open source content management systems, including Drupal. Ric has been building websites professionally since 1999 and now works primarily as a web applicationsconsultant. He lives in Bali with his wife Nalisa.This book would not have been possible without the assistance andencouragement of the Packt Team, particularly Douglas Patterson, DamienCarvill, Ajay Shanker, Rajashree Hamine, and Ved Prakash Jha.I would also like to thank the various individuals who took the time providefeedback on the previous edition of this text; their input had a positive impacton this version. Similarly, this work benefitted from the efforts of a number of reviewers, many of whom I have sadly never actually met. Thanks to allof you!Looking a bit further afield, beyond the publishing realm, I would be remiss if I failed to mention my wife Nalisa, who's CSS skills are exceeded only by her patience with me during the course of this book.Last but not least, my hat's off to the Drupal Team. Drupal 6 is a nice piece of work and shows clearly that the team is capable of continuing to deliver greatcode with a volunteer-driven, community-oriented project—no easy task, butthey manage to make it happen (again and again). Cheers!

Drupal 6 Themes

Welcome to Drupal 6 Themes. This book is an updated and expanded version of our Drupal 5Themes title. Not only has the content been updated to reflect the changes in Drupal 6, but it hasalso been expanded to include new examples, together with more information and resources.The goal of this book is to explain the principles behind the Drupal theming system and to provide a reference work for theme developers. The book provides an explanation of the Drupaltheme framework and shows how you can use it effectively to manage the presentation of your site. Throughout the text, we illustrate key points by demonstrating practical solutions tocommon problems.The book begins with an overview of the default theming system and how you can squeeze themost out of it. In the middle sections, we discuss how to execute more extensive modifications bydirectly working with Drupal's theme functions and styling. In the latter chapters, we discuss moreadvanced topics, like how to make the site's presentation layer responsive to the users or thecontent and how to build templates from scratch.As the PHPTemplate engine is now so closely integrated with Drupal, we tend to focus ontechniques that rely on PHPTemplate. We devote little space to building themes with alternativetemplate engines or directly in PHP. Also, as this work is concerned with the presentation layer of your Drupal site, we do not cover creating new modules or writing custom functionality.Please note that the author comes from a design background and that many of the explanations andrational reflect the author's background. In that light, this book may not always satisfy hardcore programmers who expect the technical issues to be explained in detail. This book should,however, make the life of many designers a little easier. We also hope that the extensive referencematerials included in this book will allow this title to find a lasting home on the shelves of manyDrupal developers.