So I'm getting into theming in drupal 8. It's my first drupal version I have worked with. I know WordPress pretty good, and all programming languages.
Here's my question now:
Is it true when making a custom theme in drupal, you don't have to code that much?! I don't really understand, I've made my basic theme, added some twig files, modded them, ... but the most of my work is (/will be) in the block, view, structure, ... department. Am I doing something wrong?
I've been trying to catch up with reading tutorials, but this question isn't really answered anywhere...
For example, if I wanted to add a header image to my theme, I just have to make a custom content type and edit the view, block, ... to add this? No coding required?
Thanks for clearing this up for me!
Drupal uses kind of nested templates. Like most outer is "html" template, which contains page head, includes js/css files and similar. It also includes next inner level, called "page" template. It usually contains common elements for all pages, like header (logo, menu, language switcher...) and footer. Then yet inner is template file specific for every page. If page is a node then it's node template or if it's a view, then view template... You can also have more inner templates, i.e. for specific block...or field.
https://www.drupal.org/node/2354645
Of course if you have different content types or block you can also have different templates for every one of them. They are set by following naming convention. So if you name it correctly, clear the cache and Drupal will star using your template instead of default one. So you can, but you don't have to override default templates.
Also when you crate your theme you can start from scratch, but you can also inherit some existing theme and just override some files.
Related
I'm a WordPress developer who's been tasked to create a temporary one-pager to a Drupal site. The client would like to have a simple front page with a logo and 4 external links until their new site is ready. Normally I'd just make a simple index.html page with some CSS and call it a day. But in this case they need some of the sub-pages from the Drupal site to continue to work.
Had it been a WordPress site, I would have just created a new template file and a new page inside WordPress, and made that the front page. But as I have zero experience with Drupal, I don't know if you can do the same thing here.
What is the easiest (quickest) way to make a simple splash-page as the front page, while having the rest of the drupal site continue to work? The splash-page should ignore all CSS and JS from the original theme — preferably have a completely independant section fromt the rest of the site.
In Drupal 7 you have few "levels" of templates. First you have "most outer" template html.tpl.php It contains html head and it is usually common for all pages.
Then inside that html.tpl.php you'll include page.tpl.php. That one should again contain some common page elements, as header and footer, but again, if your design requires that, you can have more than one page template.
Page template will include node template. In drupal you have 2 basic content (node) types but you can create many more of them. Basically for every different page layout you can create new content type (but there also are lot of different ways to achieve the same thing).
Basically you should create new content type called i.e. "splash" (machine name!). Add fields to it if they need to be back-end editable.
Then you should create new template file for your content type. Name matters, so you should call it node--splash.tpl.php . You can find and copy to your theme existing node.tpl.php and change it to your needs.
Keep in mind that when ever you add/remove new template file you have to clear the cache so drupal would scan theme directory, notice and start using new templates.
And if you need also different page template for you page you'll have to put some code into you tamplate.php file:
https://www.digett.com/insights/overriding-page-templates-content-type-drupal-7
Drupal template engine design an specific file name for override front page.
You can create the file html--front.tpl.php, and this will be used only for the front page without touch any other page. You can page here your custom HTML and reference css/js.
If the page you need share common styles with the rest of the site, I would recommend to instead override page--front.tpl.php which is basically the content of the page without the tags
For more information here is a link https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/theming/howto/customize-the-front-page-template
it´s my first day with concrete5, i built a Sitemap with my Pages and added designs and Types. But the only used template is my default template, and i don´t know how to change it, cause i added page types and page templates as well.
help would be nice ;)
Before you start editing the template, make sure that you clear the cache [System & Setting -> Clear Cache]. As it will keep showing default.php until you do this. Are you using a custom template design? This may help: http://danmorgan.me/blog/concrete5-and-custom-themes/
So I have my parent theme and my subtheme both enabled in Drupal 7.
I've specified in the .info of the subtheme that the base theme is the parent theme.
Once I create a page, how do I tell that page to inherit my subtheme?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
EDIT:
So what I want to do is create several new pages (about 20) that are going to follow the same template file as the rest of my Drupal site. However, they are all going to have different background images, link colors, and heading styles. I figured the Drupal subthemes would let me create a page that inherits the main stylesheet, but lets me modify it as needed for the new pages. Sounds like that's not what subthemes are for.
Thanks to Matt V:
Subthemes allow you to use an existing theme as the starting point for creating your own custom theme.
I may be wrong but if you want to implement different themes on different pages, it sounds like what your looking for is "hook_custom_theme", it's pretty straight forward, basically you just add:
function mymodule_custom_theme(){
//Some custom logic here
$node=node_load(arg(1));
if($node && $node->type=="my_custom_type"){
return 'my_custom_theme';
}
}
your return value must be a string that equals the machine readable name of the theme you're switching to...
re-reading your post, you may want to look into the template_preprocess_html and template_preprocess_page functions. Inside of these functions you can set and alter your template variables, i.e.
$vars['styles']=drupal_get_css();
once you've done that you could easily swap out css tags with a little bit of logic, this method would allow you to only use one theme with multiple css files....
to activate a subtheme, you need to enable it and set it as default.
The subtheme (or any theme for that matter) is for the site as a whole. To theme an individual page you could create a template for that specific page, or use the Panels module - there are many ways to skin a cat in drupal.....
here is some more info Drupal 7 theme system changes
By using themekey module you can achieve this
Refer http://drupal.org/project/themekey
To have your theme activated site-wide and used as default for ALL pages, you need to go in admin/appearance and activate your theme, and then click on the link beside the theme "Define as default".
To have your theme used on one specific page, that would be a bit trickier to do, just clarify if that is what you really wanted.
I've created for the first time a forum in Drupal. I've added some nodes (posts).
I would like to customize the order of the node components.
For example see this image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/72686/forum-node.png
I would like to move the "Previous post - Next post" to the top, and move "Login to answer" on the bottom etc..
Is there any Drupal setting to do it, or I should work on the template ? Which is the template for forum nodes ?
Otherwise I can do with a module hook, I know how to change the forms components weight, but I dunno how to change the layout of the nodes.
Thanks
Whenever you want to change to markup (HTML), you generally have to do it with theming. You wont find modules that give you options to move things around. That just too much work, and you can never make every one happy. Instead they set up the module to be overridden and provide a sensible default that most can use.
So with the Drupal theme kit, you generally have 3 options.
Override a theme function.
Override a template.
Create a preprocess function.
In this case, it looks like, there is a master template that organizes the initial post, the answers and the login option. You can find out if this is the case and how the page is created with devel themer. It's a good tool to help find templates and theme functions when you're new to Drupal theming.
I am trying to migrate my site to Drupal and I am confused about themes and templates. The look and feel of the pages in my current site are completely controlled by template files and CSS. How does it work in Drupal?
In drupal, a theme handles the appearance of the site and a template handles how your content is rendered.
Think of it like this: the template is used to render the content, then the theme is applied on that content.
Edit: So, your css files live with the theme in drupal, and have nothing to do with the templates.
In Drupal, a "theme" is just a special type of plugin that bundles together any number of templates (to control how a given piece of data gets rendered to HTML), CSS, JS files, images, and so on.
So, there is a single "template" for your oveevral page markup, a single "template" for how a sidebar block is rendered as HTML, and so on. All of them, bundled together and named, are referred to as a theme.
Look at it this way: It's possible to create a theme that has no templates. Such a theme would have CSS files that override drupal's default CSS files. Using such a theme would create a website that looks almost exactly like Drupal's default site, except it would have different colors, fonts and so on.
But if you want to change the positions of items on the page, what kinds of items are on the page and so on, you have to override the default templates by adding some of your own to your theme. These new templates let you alter what information Drupal displays and what kind of HTML Drupal will use to display it.
For example, say I want to clone StackOverflow, but I want to do it with Drupal. First thing I would do is create a new content type (call it a "question") that is just like a story but has extra fields to track voting and so on. Drupal's default templates won't know about these extra fields, so they won't display them.
So, what I do is I go into my theme and I add a new node.tpl.php file. This new template is just like the standard one, except I can add code that says "if this node is of type 'question', insert the voting gadget to the left of the body."
Does this help?
A theme is made up of a collection of template files. block.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, page.tpl.php are all template files which when combined with your CSS, JS and images produces a theme. In addition a themes can be inherited. A theme can be created with just CSS and no additional template files by inheriting from an existing theme, in which case the template files from the parent theme are used.
Another way to look at it is a theme is what you see and the template files are responsible for generating the markup.
I hope this makes it a little bit clearer.
I'm confused...
The first answer says that templates and themes have nothing to do with each other, while the second one says themes are just collections of answers.
Which one is right?
Drupal is having a template based theming system. You can define your own regions in page and can arrange the content according to that . There are some default template file such as page.tpl ,block.tpl ,node.tpl which are displaying different kind of contents .
You can write your own template file as needed for eg if you need to alter the display of user registration form or login page you can create a tpl file for that and have to redirect the data to that tpl file. You can add the css or js to these templates using drupals apis. This redirection has to be done in the themes template.php file
A theme is comprised of css, js, images, and template files. Each theme may include multiple template files.
Additionally, themes can be inherited, and a subtheme's template files could override the template files of its parent theme.