drupal theming

A lot of Drupal modules include their own CSS files, which provide default styles for any HTML rendered by the module. These styles may not suit your theme, and you might find that you must override most of them to get the look you want.

Rather than simply overriding all of these styles, it may make more sense to just completely remove the module's stylesheet and start from scratch in your theme.

This can be accomplished by messing around with the $styles page variable in Drupal's preprocesss_page() function in the template.php file.

There will come a time when you'll want to add a new region to your Drupal theme, weather you are using a stock theme, a modification of a base theme such as Zen (like me) or creating your own theme from scratch.

Drupal 6 makes the creation of new regions as simple as adding one line of code to your themes template.php file. However, by default new regions created in this manor will only be available to your themes page template (page.tpl.php) and a little extra work will be needed if you want to display it somewhere else.

I don't like the way Drupal formats the "Submitted by..." text for nodes and comments. So, I did a little bit of digging and found the offending code in the theme_node_submitted() and theme_comment_submitted() functions of node.module and comment.module respectively. These two functions are easy to override at the theme level by making a copy in your template.php file, and renaming the function to fit with your theme (replace theme with the name of your theme). I made mine look like this:

I only recently discovered about Internet Explorers non-existent handling of transparent PNGs. It only effects versions 5.5 and 6, but there are still a surprising amount of people using these outdated browsers so it's important not to forget them. There has been a fix around for some time - the aptly named, pngfix.js. Now, there is also jquery version of the png fix.

Many of the Drupal sites I develop are based on the excellent Zen theme which comes ready made with a special CSS file to fix many of Internet Explorer's well known bugs. However, one such bug affecting IE4 to IE6, can't be fixed with special css rules: all style tags after the first 30 style tags on an HTML page are not applied in Internet Explorer. When your Drupal site uses a lot of extra modules, the number of stylesheets can quickly build up to over this limit.

By default, Drupal allows you to include a search box directly into your theme. In most themes, when enabled, this search box will show up in the primary navigation bar as an input box labeled "Search this site", with a submit button labeled "Search". But what if you want to alter or completely hide these labels, or even add a new class to the input box?