The basics on themes

A theme controls the look and feel for your website. It is used to customize the general layout of all content created on your site. For each theme you have the option to add your customized logo, site name, slogan, and control what contents appear where on the theme.

Some of the characteristics of a theme are its width type – fluid type or fixed width, number of columns – one, two, three or more columns, colors/fonts and location of the columns. Fluid width themes expand or contract based on the screen display of the user to fill up the entire screen. Fixed width themes on the other hand is fixed – usually 800x600 or 1024x768.

When a person with a larger screen layout views a fixed width layout the rest of the space remains empty.

The number of columns and the location of the column is usually a fixed attribute of the theme. You can control the contents of the column from the block section of your administrative panel. Some themes allow you to change the location of the columns, most don’t. Based on the desired look and feel you want to select a two or three column layout, that is either fixed width or fluid width.

There are about 35 themes that are included in your installation. You can modify the colors and other attributes of some of these themes to make it customized for you. Alternatively you can get a specific design custom developed for your site.

To setup basic information about your site go to Administer - Site Configuration - Site Information and enter basic information about your site.

To select a theme go to Administer - Site Building - Themes. The active theme has a radio button enabled on it, and all themes available on your site have a check box next to it.

For some themes you can modify the color schemes by clicking configure and selecting a predefined theme color or selecting your own custom colors. To do this you need to select "configure" from your active theme. Additionally you can upload your logo or a custom shortcut icon that is displayed to visitors as they view your web pages. You can enable slogan and other custom capabilities based on the features of your theme.

Under global settings for your selected theme you can control if post settings (example Posted by Author Name on dd/mm/yyyy) appear on select content types.

If the search box icon is disabled it is because this module is not enabled. You can enable this from modules section. To see the search box on your theme you will need to manage its appearance from the blocks option in your control panel.

Resources

• Drupal Themes

Video

In this video you will see how to select a theme for your site and

• Setup basic information about your site
• Select a theme
• Modify color scheme for certain themes
• Upload your logo
• Change the shortcut for your theme
• manage the items that appear in a block
• and manage your administration theme.

Technorati Tags: Drupal Drupal Themes