Our main focus for the Domicile theme is restyling Drupal's markup with CSS. Although it is tempting to put all of your CSS into a single file, things can quickly grow out of control. In our theme we'll break our CSS into smaller stub files to make the theme easier to maintain using the file naming conventions for Drupal 8.By the end of this lesson you will be able to incorporate CSS files into your theme via the theme's .info file.
Additional resources
Drupal uses a series of nested template files to build out the rendered HTML pages we see in our browser. The template file page.tpl.php holds markup between <body> and </body> tags. We talked about the nested nature of template files in Lesson 3: Theming by Component.
In this lesson we will:
- create the file page.tpl.php
- add the relevant markup, and CSS classes for our grid framework
- insert relevant PHP variables so that Drupal can render each of its page components.
By the end of this lesson you will be able to create, or adapt, a page.tpl.php file to suit the conventions you identified in your style guide.
Designs often have a few elements which don't need to be easily edited and can essentially be "hard wired" into the template files. In our design there are three or four images which fall into this category. In this lesson we'll edit the page.tpl.php file to insert our design assets from Lesson 5: Extract Design Assets. By the end of this lesson you will know which variables can be used in a template file to ensure the correct directory is always used for hard-coded image files.
It's always smart to do your development work in a local environment, but eventually you will need to upload your theme your server. In this lesson we'll upload our theme to our web server using Filezilla. By the end of this lesson you will know which folder your theme needs to be uploaded to, and at least one application suitable for uploading files.
Additional resources
Once your theme is uploaded you still need to enable it before it will be applied to your site. By the end of this lesson you will be able to enable new themes for your Drupal site.
Once all of the elements are in place, it's time to get down to the real work of theming the components. In this lesson we will:
- use our style guide and checklist to find each component
- check to see if the style looks "right"
- troubleshoot broken styles so that each component looks as good as the designer's original, static files
By the end of this lesson you will be able to identify elements on a rendered Drupal page which do not have the correct styles applied, determine the source of the problem, and alter the markup or styles to correct the output displayed in a browser.
To go from design to theme we worked through three major steps: building a style guide; building out Drupal; and finally applying the style guide to Drupal. In this lesson we'll review each of the steps outlined in this learning series:
- creating a style guide with base rules, layout rules, and component rules
- extracting design assets
- configuring Drupal
- creating theme files
- debugging components from within Drupal
By the end of this lesson you will be able to outline the process needed to transform a static design file into a functional Drupal theme.
This learning series covered just the tip of the theming iceberg. Hopefully you're now feeling motivated to learn even more about theming. In this lesson we will review some of the other topics you will want to explore next including: advanced theming techniques, using a base theme, such as Omega, layout modules. By the end of this lesson you will by able to identify which videos you should (or could) watch next to learn more about theming Drupal.
In this video we cover a new Drupal 7 feature which lets us create suggestions for theme functions, in addition to suggestions for templates. We'll use this to modify the tags displaying on a node in our site.
Notes:
In the example: $item['#options]['attributes'] += $variables['item_attributes_array'][$delta]; += is a shortcut for array_merge. So it is ensuring the contents of $variables['item_attributes_array'][$delta] are included in $item['#options]['attributes'] so that any class, rdf info or other html attributes are appropriate applied to the tag links. It's possible for any number of modules to set HTML attributes on the tags field in the theme we need to make sure that they get printed out appropriately.
Additional resources
This chapter gives an introduction to how you work with Drupal's renderable, form arrays by adding an image button to the search form. It also walks through the process of adding the necessary classes to a form element so that the image button is properly aligned. The Forms API reference document is a pretty essential reference document for creating and editing forms in Drupal.
Although we use the function dsm() in this video, this should probably be dpm() as that's the preferred function name. The functions dsm() and dpm() are identical.
Additional resources
You can use custom image sizes for automatic display in your Views!
We already know that being able to set a standard for image display creates consistency and a better user experience. It also makes it for easier site administration because you don’t need to cut all of you images before you upload them. Drupal does all the work for you!! Not only can we specify what the image will look like at the node-level, we can also specify what the image will look like in Views.
I am assuming that you already know how to create custom image style presets, and are familiar with the Views module.
For this tutorial, you need to make sure the Image module that comes with Drupal Core is enabled and that you have already downloaded and enabled the Views module along with its prerequisites.
We will use the example of a blog, where we add our scaled images to display in the listing.
Walks through the process of enabling the theme developer module and showing the themer info, which is like Firebug for Drupal theming. You can choose specific elements on the page to see what Drupal template files or theme functions were involved with outputting it to the screen. You can easily look at the candidate template names that are available, as well as see all of the variables that are available from that template file. A list of documented variables can be found within the node module's node.tpl.php file, but sometimes there are undocumented variables that are coming from contributed modules or elsewhere. It's a super handy tool to have available, but only enable it when you really need it since it can adversely affect the mark-up on your page and cause some wonky behavior.
Additional notes:
The Theme Developer module is on Drupal.org at http://drupal.org/project/devel_themer. Once you find a module on Drupal.org, you can see the "machine name" for the module in the URL (it is the same name as is used to for the module's .info file as well). That is the name that Drush uses. So, in this instance, Drush is looking for "devel_themer".
drush dl devel_themer
Additional resources
Shows how to create a theme template suggestion for a specific node type. In this chapter, we create a dynamic template for the article node type by copying the node.tpl.php into a node--article.tpl.php where the 'article' is the machine-readable name for the article content type. We add some specific styling to the node author submission information as well as the date. We also discuss how Drupal looks for the most specific template suggestion (i.e. the node id), then moves to more and more generalized template files like the content type, and then the node.tpl.php as the most general. The Drupal.org documentation page that we look at can be found at http://drupal.org/node/1089656.
Additional notes:
The field_tags variable relates to the corresponding tags field on the article content type. For every field you have on your node the $content variable will contain the rendered content of that node in a key that is the name of the field. So in this case $content['field_tags'] contains all of the tags applied to the node.
Additional resources
This chapter goes through the minimum steps for registering a theme within Drupal by creating a .info file. It also shows the syntax for a theme to be able to add custom CSS to your site as we start to implement our example design.
Additional resources
Theming Basics for Drupal 7 will provide a solid foundation for translating designs into Drupal themes. You'll learn to work with .info and tpl.php template files, how to add CSS and JavaScript, how to work with the render system new in Drupal 7, how to override templates, create regions, and use the Theme Developer tool. You'll start with the original HTML, CSS and JavaScript template files that were provided by the designer so that you can follow along in translating the design into a Drupal 7 theme. The video explains Drupal's design vernacular, concepts, and special needs. We'll show you how to associate the proper CSS & Javascript files, add all of the necessary regions, and control the HTML output through page and node-specific templates. You'll learn about the best tools and strategies for controlling the look and feel of your Drupal website.
This series will cover the basics of Drupal theming while the more advanced theming topics of working with the template.php file will be covered in the Advanced Theming for Drupal 7 series. These videos pair with each other, and will finish the complete implementation of the 960 Robots theme used in both videos. You can download the theme we're building from Drupal.org: 960 Robots.
Examples in this video are based on Drupal 7 and its variants.
In this introduction video, we set the stage for the Theming Basics series. We give an overview of what Drupal theming is, the common files we will work with, and the overall steps involved. Then we start off by defining and taking a look at the .info file and HTML template (tpl.php) files. We talk about regions and theme features, introduce the render() function, and explain dynamic templates. While we are teaching Drupal 7 theming, we also make sure to point out the important differences between Drupal 6 and 7.
Additional resources
In this video we introduce the template.php file and create our first preprocess function. We explain what the preprocess hooks are and how to name the function properly, then we show a list of existing variables, and how to modify one of those existing variables.
Additional resources
Display Suite for Drupal 7
Course
This lesson covers all the updates/differences in the latest 2.x version versus other Drupal 7 releases. The new 2.x version of Display Suite is still in active development at the time that this video was published, but we want to make sure you know the changes that are coming when the new version is finally released. This video is very important to view if you are using Display Suite version 2 for the first time and have watched other videos in this series. It covers UI changes/updates as well as feature differences.
Additional resources
In this lesson we cover how all over the configurations we have learned using Display Suite are able to be exported to code. This video shows how to do this using CTool but can also be done with Features as well.
Additional resources
In this lesson we cover another "extra" of Display Suite, Views Displays. This basically allows you to take over a view template file and use Display Suite to layout your views.