Theming

Create CSS Stub Files for Drupal 7

Last updated March 5, 2020
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Check your version

This tutorial covers a topic in Drupal 7 which may or may not be the version you're using. We're keeping this tutorial online as a courtesy to users of Drupal 7, but we consider it archived.

Sprout Video

In this lesson we will convert the style guide into a series of stubs which we can view in a Web browser. The design was originally created using the templates from the 960gs. We'll use this same grid framework to ensure all of our margins are automatically adopted. Grid frameworks are excellent for rapid prototyping of designs. Ultimately many front end developers choose choose to write their own for the final theme; however, if you're just getting started try to stick with a grid framework to reduce the number of things that you need to fight with.

The original theme that was created for this design used the NineSixty base theme. There are some nifty features in this theme which are great for more complex designs; however, it is not responsive, and does not use Sass. To bring the lessons up-to-date we'll be using the 960-Compass Plugin to generate our stub files and give us some sample Sass output to work with.

By the end of this lesson you will be able to convert a style guide to a series of stub files in Sass (or CSS) using SMACSS conventions and a grid framework.

Additional resources

SMACSS (Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS) 

960gs

960-Compass-Plugin

Intro to Sass and Compass