Drupal 6 Theming

Drupal 6 Theming What’s new and how it’s better

Are we near Theming Nirvana?
Theming Nirvana is when it is considered easy for designers to create new themes, and there are many themes for random Drupal users to choose from.

Drupal 4.5: Theming Hell
Only had .theme files and theme function overrides.

Drupal 4.6: Theming Purgatory
Xtemplate just didn’t do it for us.

Drupal 4.7: Theming Limbo
PHPtemplate helped, but having only page, node, block, and comment templates is weak.

Drupal 5: Still Theming Limbo
I guess it’s not really limbo if you’re not stuck there for awhile.

Drupal 6
• Info files make obscure configuration obvious
• 31 templates available and growing
• Serious drive toward separation of logic and presentation
• Better _phptemplate_variables()
• Theme inheritance
• Pure CSS themes
• Theme engines have all this, too.

Info files

More templates
• More granular control over your content.
• Logic is separated from presentation.
• Data has already been sanitized meaning fewer inadvertent security holes.

forum-topic-list.tpl.php

aggregator-item.tpl.php

Separation

phptemplate_variables()

Theme inheritance
A sub theme sets ‘base theme’ in info file
A sub theme gains all style sheets
A sub theme gains all templates
A sub theme gains all functions in template.php
A sub theme should never use phptemplate_* functions
Safest way to ‘tweak’ a theme and still be able to upgrade the theme

CSS only themes
Core page.tpl.php theme based on zen
Uses well-named classes to identify areas
A theme with just an .info file will create an ugly site but with clean XHTML that can be manipulated

Theme engines
Smarty, PHPTal, LOLTheme
Register an extension -- .smarty
Register a renderer – smarty_template_render()
Discover templates on behalf of the theme
Load a template.php file on behalf of the theme

Are we near Theming Nirvana?
Not everything templatized
Not a complete enough set of well-named classes
Not enough direction for contrib modules in how they create their HTML
Not enough direction for contrib theme authors
Poor infrastructure for finding themes on drupal.org

We are merely Enlightened Maybe Nirvana in Drupal 7

Care to contribute?
Help participate and clean up our XHTML CSS
Help create a set of well-named classes to use across Drupal
Help create templates that do not yet exist

http://hanamitsuki.com	213
http://groups.drupal.org	146
http://www.slideshare.net	113
http://drupaltaiwan.org	55
http://www.ithome.com.tw	48
http://hanamizuki.blog.ithome.com.tw	20
http://playdrupal.com	18
http://drupalranch.com	16
http://thuannvn.blogspot.com	15
http://bashful.cs.vt.edu	13
http://vle.worldbank.org	13
http://localhost	7
http://www.angrydonuts.com	6
http://www.playdrupal.com	5
http://connect2.prud.us	3
http://blog.ithome.com.tw	3
http://5lineas.com	2
http://www.filescon.com	2
http://saylinux.net	2
http://www.cms.rk.edu.pl	2
http://www.hanamitsuki.com	2
http://static.slidesharecdn.com	1
http://hostsh.com.br	1
http://www.mostrey.be	1
http://www.rapidsharefast.com	1
http://cache.baidu.com	1
http://blogs.sun.com	1
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1

Drupal 6 Theming

by merlinofchaos on Sep 23, 2007

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Drupal 6 Theming — Presentation Transcript