Drupal® For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11

Customizing Themes

In This Chapter

• Adding a new theme
• Understanding theme structure
• Modifying a theme
• Installing your theme
• Customizing your site's appearance

In this chapter, we take you through the anatomy of a simple theme. We 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 create a unique and custom site by taking an existing theme and making a few relatively small changes to it.

Drupal 7 themes have made tremendous strides in allowing you to customize your site from the admin interface. Prior to Drupal 7, if you wanted to make some basic changes to a theme, you had to know CSS or HTML. To make bigger changes, you had to have some understanding of PHP code. And while you still need all that knowledge if you're going to truly customize and create a new and unique theme, you can do an enormous amount without ever touching the code. In this chapter, we take a look at what files go into a theme and explore the options that new Drupal 7 themes give you for customization.

Adding New Themes

You can change the appearance of your site with just a few clicks when you add a new theme. Drupal 7 makes installing new themes so easy, there's no reason not to go find several and install them.

Finding new themes

New themes, like modules, are located at http://drupal.org. To find Drupal 7-compatible themes, follow these steps:

1. Choose AppearanceInstall New Theme. ...