Drupal For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Customizing Themes

In This Chapter

• Understanding theme structure

• Modifying a theme

• Installing your theme

• Customizing your site appearance

In this chapter, I take you through the anatomy of a simple theme. I show you how to change things to make your site more distinctive. A single chapter on creating a custom Drupal theme can't possibly cover all the details, but you can make a surprising number of changes to a site by taking an existing theme and making a few relatively small changes to it.

If you are a bit familiar with CSS or HTML, you're in luck. Understanding a little PHP code would be great, but if you don't know any of these, you can still modify an existing theme and get great results.

Dissecting a Theme

Before you begin changing a theme, you need to know how a theme is structured. In this section, I show you the basic structure of a Drupal theme. I use the Bluemarine theme because it contains all of the essential parts of a theme.

To better follow the discussion, you need to enable the Bluemarine theme. You also need to activate the primary menu, which is not visible by default with this theme. Follow these steps:

1. Choose Administer

   

2. Check the Enabled box and select the Default radio button next to the Bluemarine theme.

3. Click Save configuration.

4. Choose Administer

   

5. Find the Primary ...