Introduction to Theming Basics for Drupal 7

Discover hundreds more Drupal tutorial videos at Drupalize.Me/Videos. 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 video 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 video. These videos pair with each other, and will finish the complete implementation of the 960 Robots theme used in both videos. Examples in this video are based on Drupal 7 and its variants. Here are the chapters included in this video; 1.) Introduction to Drupal 7 Theming 2.) Preparing a site for theming 3.) Enabling themes and theme settings 4.) Translating a design into a Drupal theme 5.) Helpful browser extensions for Drupal theming 6.) Creating the .info file 7.) Customizing the page template file 8.) Adding regions to the page template 9.) Customizing the node template 10.) Creating templates for node types 11.) Using the theme developer module 12.) Adding JavaScript to a theme 13.) Tour of popular page template variables 14.) Adding a screenshot to your theme 15.) Conclusion to Theming Basics 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, as well as 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, 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.