Design and Prototyping for Drupal

Other Things You Should Know About Base Themes

Now that you’ve gotten the hang of editing your theme’s .info file and making a child theme, there are a couple of other things that you should bear in mind when working:

Clear the Theme Registry!

Any time you add a new element to your .info file—whether it’s to add a new region to your page, or add a new stylesheet (for example, I sometimes like to add a separate stylesheet for the navigation on sites with complex navigation styles), you must clear your theme registry. Sometimes, for really sticky issues, you can also try clearing all of the caches. You can clear all caches by going into Configuration→Performance and pressing the “Clear all Caches” button. If you’re feeling super nerdy, you can also use the command drush cc all to clear the caches from within Drush, the command line tool for Drupal. We’ll discuss Drush in the next book, Drupal Development Tricks for Designers (cue evil laughing).

Note

You don’t have to clear the cache every time you do something simple, like changing the CSS in your theme; but if you make a change and nothing happens, clearing the cache will often help.

Working with Regions

Regions are Drupal’s way of laying out containers for content in a given theme. Many themes, such as Bartik and Omega, come with a copious volume of regions—all with odd names like “Triptych,” “Postscript,” and “Preface”—for your block organization pleasure. This is, in fact, one of the things you want in a base theme—the more regions ...