Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes
for your Drupal 6 site with clean
layout and powerful CSS styling by
Ric Shreves
Drupal For Designers
In Detail 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
systems 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
Drupals 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 dont 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.
Personal Review: Drupal 6 Themes: Create new themes for your
Drupal 6 site with clean layout and powerful CSS styling by Ric
Shreves
Over the past year and a half I've been doing quite a bit of work with
Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System (CMS).
Whenever I'm asked how I'm finding Drupal, my answer is usually that, "I
have a love hate relationship with it." There is no doubt that Drupal is a
very powerful and flexible CMS and more and more companies,
universities, communities and individuals are using it. If you don't believe
me just look through the various Case Studies and also the list of Drupal
sites posted by Drupal's creator and project lead, Dries Buytaert. Most of
my frustrations came from the fact that I'm used to having complete control
over the markup behind the sites I build. At first I found this not to be the
case with Drupal, but as I began to work more and more with it and learn
the ins and outs, I started to see how to regain that control.
Enter Drupal 6 Themes by Ric Shreves. This book opened my eyes to
some things that I didn't know or understand about theming Drupal. While
this book is geared towards Drupal 6, there were quite a few things I was
able to learn and apply to Drupal 5 which is the version of Drupal that we
are currently using at work (The other option of course would be to buy
Drupal 5 themes by the same Author and Publisher). As the book rightly
says "Drupal 6 Themes is an ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 6."

The 1st few chapters (1-3) discuss the basics of Drupal theming. I felt
these chapters weren't really for me since I was already familiar with the
basics. However, it will be very good for person's not familiar with Drupal
theming at all. It describes what a theme is, how to add new themes and
how to configure those themes. Theme engines are also discussed. Drupal
is capable of using a variety of theming engines to build sites, such as
Smarty, PHPTal and XTemplate. However, Drupal is distributed with
PHPTemplate which relies on good old PHP and which many PHP
developers are already familiar with.
Chapters 4-5 then delve into template files, themable functions and how to
intercept and override them. This is where you begin to regain control over
the markup output by Drupal and it's modules and are able to customize it
the way you want it. One of the nice things about Drupal is that there are
certain themable functions in the core and in contributed modules that
follow a naming convention (ie. `theme_function_name'), which makes it
easy for you to identify and override the functionality and output from it's
original format. The principles of naming conventions applies to overriding
templates as well. For instance one of the template files that is essential to
every Drupal theme is the page.tpl.php file. This controls the general layout
of the site and does most of the heavy lifting. You could for instance
override this and have a different look for your user pages by simply
creating a new file called page-user.tpl.php and making adjustments as
necessary. You can do a whole lot more, but I'll let you read the book to
find out all the juicy details.
Chapter 6, shows you to modify an existing theme, the Zen theme, which
prides itself on being flexible and one of the better themes to start with
when learning how to create themes in Drupal. Chapters 7-8 continue to
build upon and tie everything together. Ric shows you how to create a
theme from scratch and have multiple page templates. You will also learn
how to control how your theme is displayed based on the type of content,
the user viewing it and other factors. Lastly, chapter 9 demonstrates how
to theme the various forms generated by the Drupal core. A form I found
myself wanting to customize recently was the User Login Block, luckily for
me, this was covered in the book and I learnt the different approaches to
modifying this and other forms within Drupal.
With all that said, if you're new to theming in Drupal, I definitely
recommend this book. Ric did a good job of giving a solid foundation and
covering most of what you need to know to comfortably create themes in
Drupal.
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