Building a Theme for Drupal 7
After having built out many themes for Drupal 6 (and a couple for Drupal 5), I'm going to start from scratch on a couple designs and build a theme in Drupal 7, which will be released sometime in 2010. I'll take you along my journey in this article.
Please note, this article is a work in progress, and I'll be updating it as I go. Hopefully, within a couple weeks, I'll have the article complete, and a nice new theme to release on Drupal.org (maybe), only for Drupal 7.
To get things kicked off, here are a few articles that have good background information on Drupal 7 theming:
- On the State of Drupal Themes and Theming
- Create a CSS-only Theme
- Closer, Ever Closer, to Pure-CSS Bliss in Drupal
- Drupal 7 Theme Guide [placeholder for now]
Building the Site (Step 1)
With Drupal 7, you get a new, easier to use installer, and a much nicer administrative interface than Drupal 6/5/4/etc. The admin interface uses a new theme, Seven, which is pretty nice on its own (almost good enough that I might build a quick blog-style site using that theme alone).
I set up a test Drupal 7 installation on my Hot Drupal hosting account (same account on which this site is currently running), and went through the preliminaries; setting up a few user accounts, using Devel to generate some test content, and moving around some blocks.
Next, I followed the directions I wrote up in the Drupal.org Handbooks, outlining how to create a CSS-only Theme for Drupal. Basically, create a folder in sites/sitename/themes with your theme name, then an .info file inside that folder to describe the theme to Drupal, and then make some CSS stylesheets to insert your own styles.
To be continued...
