Themes

Drupal comes with several themes already installed including Bartik which is give the website the default look and feel and Seven which is used for administration mode. There are hundreds of themes available for download to customise the appearance of your site and this might be the one area of Drupal that you customise to reflect your organisation.

We cover some of the configuration options for a theme here and show you how to download a theme but your own development team will need to make a sub-theme and edit some files to truly customise the website and you need a Drupal for Themers course or resources for this to happen. However a good themer will be able to integrate a theme with any Drupal website without the need for any additional configuration beyond the installation of the theme itself.

Configuration

Most themes allows the configuration of various options such as the logo and favicon image and so forth. The default Bartik them implements the Color feature and allows the default colours to be customised. Select the Appearance administration option and change the settings for the theme.

There are individual or global settings that can be used to change options for which items are displayed in a theme and also to upload and specify the logo and favicon files.

Installing a Theme

A theme is easy to install once you have determined the URL to install from. You can find a theme on http://www.drupal.org and copy the URL of the tar.gz file to paste into the install theme area of the Appearance administration theme.

http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/danland-7.x-1.0.tar.gz
 

Enable the theme and then set as default to change the appearance of your website radically.

Customising a theme is a full subject in itself and you need to get help from a professional to customise a theme or build one from scratch. For the moment search for a theme that is near to your requirements or a theme that allows some degree of configuration to build the functionality of the site before getting a theme developed by a themer.

We run a Drupal for Themers course for designers who want to learn how to create and customise Drupal themes. However in this instance we need to do a quick and dirty hack to remove the Theme inspired by message and replace it with our own message. Now this is not recommended practise which requires we create a sub-theme and then change the area which has <p>Theme by.... to have your own message at the bottom of the page.