Karthik Kumar - Drupal 7 Theming Cookbook

Karthik Kumar is a Drupal developer residing in Chennai, India. He first came across Drupal in late 2004 and has been a fan ever since. He maintains a number of modules on http://drupal.org under the moniker Zen, http://drupal.org/user/21209, and has also made substantial contributions towards the development of Drupal core.

To my reviewers, Kevin Davison and Richard Eriksson, for their careful scrutiny. To all the people at Packt involved in the making of this bookSarah Cullington, Hyacintha D'Souza, Joyslita D'Souza, and Alka Nayakfor their guidance and patience. To Dries and the Drupal developer community for making Drupal what it is today. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents for all the freedom that they have given me.

Kevin Davison is a Manager, Web Generalist, Drupaler at Quevin, LLC in San Francisco, CA. Experience with Drupal began as an experiment on Quevin.com, and it has evolved to become his passion. You can find Kevin actively involved at many DrupalCon's, Camps, SFDUG, Drupal.org support, @Quevin, and with the Drupal community on IRC (Quevin).

Quevin (kweh-vin) the business stands for its effective methods of planning, designing, and developing exceptional Drupal-based websites. Quevin is a full-service web production team, with a single managing director who is available to speak with you directly.

He was the Technical Reviewer for the last version of this book, Drupal 6 Theming Cookbook .

Thanks to the Drupal community for making all of this possible and to Dries for having the vision. Packt Publishing has made this a great learning opportunity.

Richard Eriksson has been a member of the Drupal community since 2004 (visit his profile at http://drupal.org/user/8791). He has worked on the Community Support and Systems Administration team at Bryght, the first commercial Drupal venture (later purchased by Raincity Studios), and later at OpenRoadCommunications, where he helped build video-intensive multilingual Drupal websites promoting video games. He also maintains an independent consultancy called Ethical Detergent specializing in Drupal maintenance and support. On Drupal.org, he maintains the Pirate and RSS Permissions modules, the Cherry Blossom Theme, and most recently, the Readability Button module. He writes occasionally on his blog, Just a Gwai Lo (http://justagwailo.com/).

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Preface

Themes are among the most powerful and flexible features available when it comes to the presentation of a website. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done correctly, allows developers and designers to customize and micromanage each and every aspect of the site. Furthermore, the Drupal theming system and its APIs allow for the design of custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.

This book provides a plethora of solutions that enable Drupal theme designers to make full use of all its features and its inherent extensibility to style their sites just the way they want to. It covers numerous aspects from using contributed and custom themes to leveraging the powerful Fields API introduced in Drupal 7 along with the Views and Panels modules to create rich designs and layouts that are easy to administer and maintain.

Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of practical tasks, this book will systematically guide readers towards solutions that are central to Drupal theming. Each recipe is divided into the following sections:

• An Introduction that explains what the recipe is about
• Getting ready lists any prerequisite steps required for the recipe to work
• How to do it describes how to implement the recipe
• How it works explains how the recipe works
• There's more catalogs useful information related to the recipe

While it is recommended that readers follow the recipes in each chapter in sequence, it is also possible to sift through the recipes at random. Special attention should always be paid to the Getting ready section of each recipe, which provides information on preliminary steps that need to be performed, and in some cases, specify if the recipe builds on the result of earlier recipes in the same chapter.