Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System (CMS). Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is one of the most popular choices for creating a CMS website.
Drupal employs a specialized templating system and supports themes, which allow you to change the look and feel of the system's front and back-end interfaces.
Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal 6 website, this book is for you. This book is a revised, updated and expanded edition of Drupal 5 Themes, written specifically for Drupal 6. The book will show you techniques and tools to help you improve the look and feel of any Drupal 6-powered website.
Starting from the basics of theme setup and configuration, you will learn about the Drupal theming architecture and the PHPTemplate engine, and then move on to modifying existing themes and building new themes from scratch. You will find out about tools to make your theme development easier, and also find invaluable information about under-documented elements of the theming system.
What you will learn from this book?
- Learn about the Drupal 6 Theming Architecture
- Find and install new themes
- Get the most from Drupal's theme configuration system
- Create a new theme from scratch
- Master PHPTemplate
- Modify the default templates and styles
- Override the default templates with your own
- Create dynamic styling which responds to the content or the user
- Discover tools that make theming easier and more efficient
Approach
This book helps you understand the logic behind the theming system employed in Drupal, and how to make it work for you. You will learn key concepts and work through examples with careful, step-by-step instructions.
Who this book is written for?
The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity - you don't need to know anything about theming in Drupal, although you should be familiar with the basic operation of the Drupal system.
Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 6 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.
Regardless of your technical skills, this book will teach you to design themes for your Drupal websites in the easiest way.
About the Author
Ric Shreves is a partner in water&stone, a web development company that specializes in open source content management systems. He works primarily as a consultant and business systems analyst is currently on extended assignment 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 my friend (and editor at ComputerWorld) Stefan Hammond, who provides more than a modicum of support and encouragement -- together with much-needed reality checks. Ric Shreves is a partner in water&stone water&stone, a web development company 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 applications consultant. He lives in Bali with his wife Nalisa.
