1. By Alex Loescher Robert Partch and Robert Pimentel 1

2.  What are Themes?  Properties of Themes  How to use Themes  How are Themes stored?  Installing new themes 2

3.  Themes allow a user to conveniently configure the style and layout of their site.  A user can pick a theme that best fits the purpose of their web site. 3

4. There are many things that you can do with themes to customize the experience of your own site. 4

5.  Each user can actually enable their own theme, allowing each user to see the site differently.  This property is great if users want to customize properties of the site for their own convenience.  This is only possible if an administrator for the site allows this function 5

6.  Each theme has its own configuration for settings.  These settings range from allowing pictures to be shown in comments to disabling the site logo (more on this later). 6

7.  Sub-Themes are themes that are related to parent themes.  Sub-Themes inherit their parents resources making it easier to create new themes.  Sub-Themes can be parents of other sub-themes. 7

8.  A front-end theme is displayed when a normal user views the site.  A back-end theme is displayed when the administrator views the site. 8

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13.  One of the easiest ways to change the layout of your Drupal site, is to edit an already made theme.  To do this, you can configure where different “Blocks” are located.  Each Block is assigned a region – where it is located on the Drupal site.  Each Theme has a different configuration, different Blocks in different regions. 13

14. 14 Push Button Zen

15.  Here is an example of the different regions that blocks can be placed in.  All of this is defined in the Theme’s.info file. 15

16.  The only thing required for the theme, is a.info file.  If meta data, style sheets, JavaScipts, block regions etc. are all defined in the file. 16

17.  Template file (.tpl.php) – Used for the xHTML markup and PHP variables. They also may output other data types such as xml rss.  Template.php – For all the conditional logic and data processing. Can be used to hold preprocessors for generating variables before they are merged with markup inside.tpl.php files.  Note: None of these files are required for a theme. 17

18.  Themes have a unique storage compared to other sections in Drupal.  Themes do not contain their own table in the Drupal database. Instead the data is kept in a separate folder. 18

19. User Table 19 System Table

20.  Choose A Theme  You can find Drupal themes on their website. ◦ http://drupal.org/project/Themes http://drupal.org/project/Themes  Examples: 20

21.  The Drupal website had a repository of user submitted themes.  Submitted themes are subject to design specifications, as well as coding conventions. 21

22.  Choose the correct file for your version.  Themes for previous versions are not compatible with newer ones. 22

23.  All you have to do, is extract the.gz file into your /drupal-6.17/themes directory.  No need to modify the database, or even the Drupal site. The new themes (once extracted) will appear automatically! 23

24.  Upload the theme file using SSH  /public_html/drupal-6.17/themes  Extracting: 24

25.  Before Install  Administer  Site Building  Themes 25

26.  After Install 26

27.  Before Install  Status shows if theme is enabled  1 = Enabled0 = Disabled 27

28.  After Install  New theme installed 28

29.  Choose A Theme ◦ Drupal, Google  Download Theme  Upload & Extract ◦ publict_html/drupal-6.17/themes  View Themes in Drupal ◦ Administer  Site Building  Themes  Database Table ◦ Find it in the System table in your Database 29