Drupal Themes

"One of the things we set out to accomplish was to create a resource. We put together a catalog of the system's 20+ stylesheets and we go through all the default themeable functions. The information is organized logically and will make this a resource people can put on their shelf and turn to when needed. Being able to quickly lay your hands on the information concerning the styles and the themeable functions is a real time-saver." - Ric Shreves, author.

Drupal is an award winning open source Content Management System. Based on PHP/MySQL, its power and flexibility combined with its exceptional design mean it is already on the way to becoming the de facto standard for CMS Websites. Drupal's modular design and structured source code make it both highly flexible and easily extended and modified. Drupal is extremely scalable, making it ideal for both a simple personal website as well as an industrial strength commercial or institutional web presence.

Drupal is a model open source project in that it has a large, friendly community of people who contribute to the project in various ways. Drupal is not only free and easy to use, but this community provides on going mutual support.

This book is the ideal introduction to theming with Drupal 5. If you want to create a striking new look for your Drupal website, this book is for you. 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. Included is a complete guide to the various style sheets and themeable functions in Drupal 5, making this book a valuable resource even to experienced theme developers. It covers:

• Creating custom templates
• Basics of theming in pure PHP
• Modifying an existing PHPTemplate theme-- a step-by-step guide
• Creating a new PHPTemplate theme--a step-by-step guide
• Working with forms

The main requirements to make use of this book are knowledge of HTML, CSS, and a touch of creativity! Although this book aims to make Drupal theming accessible to designers, theming in Drupal 5 involves writing some PHP code, and a basic knowledge of PHP will be helpful.