(Tutorial) Building Drupal 5 Themes

Tutorial : Building Drupal 5 Themes

Building a New Theme

This tutorial takes us into the world of building Drupal themes from scratch. While many people may begin their theme project by copying and modifying an existing theme, in this tutorial, we cater to the purists who want to do it all themselves.

To follow fully the examples in this tutorial, you will need your favorite web editor (Dreamweaver or another similar program) and, preferably, access to a development server on which to preview your work. In the section dealing with pure PHP themes, we will be using as our example the Chameleon theme from the default Drupal distro.

Planning the Build

How you go about building a theme is largely framed by your intentions for the theme. If you intend to release the theme for the use of others, then it is best to follow certain (albeit largely unwritten) conventions that make the resulting theme more "standard" and therefore, easier for others to use. In contrast, if use by others is not a factor, then you can proceed in a fashion that tailors the code more narrowly to your needs.

In terms of features, our goal here is to create a theme with the following attributes:

• Employs PHPTemplate
• Valid XHTML, pure CSS
• Supports one to three columns
• Supports theme configuration options native to PHPTemplate (e.g., logo, search box, site slogan, etc.)

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Courtesy : Themeswiki.org