Drupal Development Blog

I found out by going to the themes screen in administration that my current default theme is called Garland. I like the fact that it is a liquid page design. So instead of changing over to another, instead I'm going to see what I can by way of configuring it.

Well that was fun. I played around with the color selector a bit and saved my minor changes. But it's not going to let me make the more fundamental changes I want to. For that I guess I'll have to open up my copy of filezilla and do a little back end exploring.

By opening an FTP connection to /public_html/drupaldev/themes/ I can see folders for Garland and several other themes. I'm going to copy Garland to my local machine, rename it Marland, and upload Marland back up to my server.

Ok, now my themes directory includes bluemarine, chameleon, engines, garland, marland, and pushbutton.

Ah hah!

Sorry to shout, but this was pretty easy so far. I've just navigated back to the admin > themes screen and there's my new theme, Marland, listed alphabetically right after Garland. One other thing I notice here is that there are subdirectories inside of chameleon and garland named marvin and minnelli; those show up as additional themes. But since I made a copy of garland and renamed in marland shouldn't there also be a minnelli theme showing up for garland?

Hmm. Maybe not, because there's already a minnelli theme under garland. Betcha if I'd rename my garland copy to aardvark then I'd see aardvark/minnelli instead of garland/minnelli. So I'm just going to rename - using Filezilla - marland/minnelli to marland/spinoza and then refresh the admin themes screen.

Of course this worked just fine. After renaming and refreshing I now see

spinoza: themes/marland/spinoza

at the bottom of my themes listings.

Darn

My blog entry has caused this page to fail validation. I'm running HTML Tidy on my Mozilla Firefox browser and use the target="_new" attribute on links so as to avoid sending folks all over cyberspace. The W3C validator's explanation suggests that I may consider changing the document type from strict to transitional.

A quick search with my text editor reveals that the doctype declaration is in the file

themes/marland/page.tpl.php

so I make the needed edit, upload the revision and reload the page on my browser. Woops, also have to change the default theme from garland to marland.

Well that didn't completely fix it, but the main thing is that I've created and modified a theme, admittedly in a minor way.