Whenever an online visitor clicks on a website, the primary factor considered by that visitor is design & layout of the website. More appealing is the design of the website, the greater is the possibility of optimized traffic on it. In order to make the look of a website much better, the themes are of highly importance irrespective of the platform on which that particular website has been built. Due to this reason, Drupal theme development has become a crucial process that helps a lot in creating the eye-tempting designs. A team of innovative Drupal web developers always keep themselves busy in creating attractive themes for the website.
How to build a Drupal theme?
The importance of the themes is known to everyone from a team of web designers & developers to the potential visitors. In fact, Drupal theme development process is a key part of a fully-functional and an appealing web design. A Drupal theme can be created by considering the three ways as listed below:-
- Scratch
- Starter theme
- Sub-theme
All the above-mentioned ways have their own advantages, so their selection depends on ease of use by the developers. Let’s start a brief description about all of them.
- Scratch: The Drupal theme development process becomes quite easy from scratch. If you want to create Drupal 7 themes with the help of this effective way, then the basic concepts of CSS and HTML must be known to you. The basic knowledge of PHP and jQuery is an additional advantage, but don’t worry you can manage it in an easy manner even without being familiar with these languages. To start Drupal theme development process, the primary requirement is to have a theme folder. This folder is called as a “base_theme” and the file required for creating this theme is named .info file. Save this file with the name base-theme.info. Without the addition of CSS or JavaScript to a theme, it is of no use. The best practice that will help you in the future to update the work is that make a different tidy folder and keep all these files into it. The proper arrangement of files help the developers to work on your left task without wasting much time in understanding and making preparations.
- Starter themes: It is also one of the great ways opted for Drupal theme development. A starter theme helps to meet the exact expectations regarding design. The major benefit of starter themes is that direct changes can be observed in the theme as you add or remove the code.
- Sub-themes: Sub-themes are also widely used to begin the process of theme development. It is basically a package of zipped files consisting basic configurations that help a lot in the Drupal theme development. Necessary changes can be made to the name and other settings according to the requirements. Once the changes have been done, proceed with customizing jQuery and CSS. Override code in a sub-theme and is placed inside the base themes.
An overview of steps for creating custom themes
An overview of basic steps required for creating custom themes are summarized as follows:-
- Create a HTML and CSS file.
- To describe the basic information about theme, also create an .info file.
- File names should be according to the Drupal standards.
- In the template files, relevant variables should be inserted.
- For blocks and nodes, additional template files are required.
Drupal theme development process is a series of several crucial steps and the various approaches in this regard are: scratch, starter themes and sub-themes. Responsive Blog is an example of a Drupal 7 theme and includes the features such as high response & mobile-friendly.
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Posted By – Drupal Web Development Team