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by
Michael Peacock | April 2008 |
Drupal e-Commerce Open Source
You have a Drupal website and an online store; your product catalog is online and you have set up customer and staff users on the site; the only complaint so far is how the website looks. You like the default design, but do not think it is appropriate for your site or your store; you want something more tailored to your business.
In this article by Michael Peacock we will learn how to customize the default theme in Drupal.
Let's look at the default theme (garland) and customize it.
We can customize the following features:
- Color scheme, either based on a color set, or by changing the individual colors
- If certain elements, such as the logo, are displayed
- The logo
- The favicon
Back in the Themes section of the Administer area, there is a configure link next to each theme; if we click this we are taken to the theme's configuration page.
Although Doug ideally wants a new theme that is unique to his website, he also wants to have a look at a few different options for the default theme. In particular, he wants to add his company's logo to the website and try a number of red color schemes as those are his corporate colors.
Color Scheme
The color scheme settings are quite intuitive and easy to change. We can either:
- Select a color set
- Change each color by entering the hexadecimal color codes (the # followed by 6 characters)
- Select the colors from the color wheel
To change a color using the color wheel, we need to click on the color type (base color, link color, etc.) to select it and then chose the general color from the wheel and the shade of the color from the square within.
When we change the colors or color set, the preview window below the settings automatically updates to reflect the color change.
The following color sets are available:
- Blue Lagoon (the default set)
- Ash
- Aquamarine
- Belgian Chocolate
- Bluemarine
- Citrus Blast
- Cold Day
- Greenbeam
- Meditarrano
- Mercury
- Nocturnal
- Olivia
- Pink Plastic
- Shiny Tomato
- Teal Top
- Custom
Quite a number of these are red-based color schemes, let's look into them, they are:
- Belgian Chocolate
- Meditarrano
- Shiny Tomato
Belgian Chocolate Color Set
The Belgian Chocolate color set uses a dark red header with a gradient starting with black flowing into a dark red color. The page's background is a cream color and the main content area has a white background as illustrated by the picture below:
Mediterrano Color Set
The Mediterrano color set uses a lighter red color where the gradient in the header starts with a light orange color which then flows into a light red color. Similar to the Belgian Chocolate color scheme the background is cream in color with a white background for the content area.
Shiny Tomato Color Set
The Shiny Tomato color set has a gradient header that starts with deep red and flows into a bright red color. The page's background is light grey with white background for the main content area, reflecting a professional image.
The Shiny Tomato color set uses a red scheme which is in Doug's logo and he feels this set is the most professional of the three and wants us to use that.
Toggle Display
With the toggle display options, we can select the elements we wish to display on our site, these include:
- Logo
- Site name
- Site slogan
- Mission statement
- User pictures in posts
- User pictures in comments
- Search box
- Shortcut icon
By default Site Slogan, User pictures in posts, User pictures in comments, and Search box are disabled, the rest are already enabled. Unfortunately with this theme we can only enable the Site Slogan; the other three options cannot be enabled with our choice of theme.
Doug initially wanted the slogan to be enabled; however, because of the length of his slogan, users with a small screen would not see the website name or the slogan:
The slogan and site name will only be displayed if we have a larger screen as illustrated below:
Because of this problem, Doug decided it was not worth leaving the option enabled!
Logo Image Settings
As Doug also wants his logo to go into the website, we need to uncheck the option for using the default logo and select the logo file to upload.
Once the logo has been uploaded, the website's header immediately updates to include the logo we have just uploaded, as shown below:
Shortcut Icon Settings
The final option for customizing the sites theme is the Shortcut icon settings. The shortcut icon is the favicon displayed in the address bar of our browser next to the web address. By default, this is a small version of the Drupal logo.
Let's customize this to a small version of Doug's logo. Graphics editing programs have little provisions for creating icon files, so let's use a web-based tool to turn the logo into a favicon. We can use http://www.htmlkit.com/services/favicon/, which is a popular online favicon generator.
On this website we can upload our logo:
Once the image has been uploaded, a preview of the icon is displayed on the site and we can download a copy of it.
Now that we have our favicon generated and downloaded, we can upload it to our website:
Once this is uploaded our favicon updates automatically, as shown below:
The Customized Skin
These changes leave us with a skin that looks like this:
Doug is really pleased with these changes, and thinks it is a massive improvement on the default theme.
Summary
We have just seen how to customize the default theme in Drupal. It's just one of the many ways in which we can manipulate themes in Drupal.
About the Author :
Michael Peacock
Michael Peacock is a web developer from Newcastle, UK and has a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Durham. After meeting his business partner at Durham, he co-founded Peacock Carter, a Newcastle based creative consultancy specializing in web design, web development and corporate identity.
Michael loves working on web related projects. When he is not working on client projects, he is often tinkering with a web app of his own.
He has been involved with a number of books, having written two books himself (and working on his third): Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce Packt, and Building websites with TYPO3 Packt. He has also done technical reviews of two other books: Mobile Web Development Packt, and Drupal Education & E-Learning Packt.
You can follow Michael on Twitter.
Books From Packt
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