November 8, 2011

Installing the Drupal Theme

By Chad Gleaves


After we are Done with the particular Drupal installation, we might need to change the look and feel of the way the website looks and can want to customize it in accordance with our requirements.

There are numerous themes which can be down loaded from the Drupal web site which supports us get started.

Installing a new theme is incredibly straightforward:

The basics associated with managing modules and themes are rather similar. If we view to the sites/all folder we're going to find a README.txt file.

Ezinearticles should be used to position downloaded and custom modules and styles which are common to all sites. This will allow us more easily update Drupal primary files. These modules and themes must be placed in subdirectories called modules and themes the following:

sites/all/modules sites/all/themes

We can find a synopsis of any contributed element or theme on its project page, but many modules and also themes also include README.txt file with more detailed information.

To look at a module's README.txt file without needing to download anything, pay a visit to http://drupalcode.org/project/modulename.git/blob/HEAD:/README.txt.

We must ensure to first replace the word modulename with the name from the particular module.

With regard to themes, visit http://drupalcode.org/project/themename.git/blob/HEAD:/README.txt. Click on administer themes as well as enable the new style (Drupal will auto-detect its profile).

We must edit our user preferences and choose the new theme. If we want it to be the default theme for all users, we need to check the default box in the themes or templates administration page.

Why don't we now download a fresh theme package. It must be noted that designs for different Drupal versions usually are not compatible, version 5.x themes fail with Drupal 6.a and reverse. When we go through any README or even INSTALL files in the package we will find out if there are any unique steps needed for this specific theme.

Once this is achieved we need to upload the particular contents of the design package to a new directory in the themes directory in our Drupal site.

Throughout Drupal 5.x & Some.x, we need to place our themes inside /sites/all/themes/yourThemeName

Let us consider and example theme to help us understand the install drupalTheme process much better.

Zen is the ultimate starting theme for Drupal. If we are building our own standards-compliant theme, we will find it easier to start with Zen than to begin with Garland or Bluemarine. This theme has fantastic online documentation and a great deal of code comments for both the PHP (template.perl) and HTML (site.tpl.php, node.tpl.php). The idea behind the Zen concept is to have a very versatile standards-compliant and semantically correct XHTML concept that can be highly altered through CSS as well as an enhanced version involving Drupal's template system.

Along with, Zen is clean and basic with either a one particular, two, or 3 column layout involving fixed or fluid width. In addition, the particular HTML source order has content put before sidebars or the navbar with regard to increased accessibility along with SEO. The identify is a homage on the CSS Zen Garden website where designers can easily redesign the page purely through the use of Web page.




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