It is an open-source software distributed under the GPL (“GNU General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Drupal was originally written by Dries Buytaert, who still heads the Drupal project. Buytaert transliterated the Dutch word ‘druppel’, which means ‘droplet‘ to create the name ‘Drupal,’ in order to make an indirect reference to the community aspects of the project through the Dutch word ‘dorp’ , meaning ‘village’. He opened the source code for community work in 2001.

Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

While some web designers have criticized Drupal as difficult to learn, the system has received extensive accolades for its usefulness and relatively rapid build time. The modular approach of Drupal and its ability to enhance the core functionality by use of hooks is a marvel of software engineering.

Drupal provides a flexible way to create custom look and feel of website by use of themes. Drupal theme essentially consists of atleast one template file, a style file for custom appearance & a theme file for overriding Drupal themeable functions. Drupal 5 comes with 4 default themes.

Where are Drupal themes located

Drupal default themes are contained in themes folder in the root installation of Drupal. Apart from themes, the folder contains theme engines available to the installation.

Another location for the themes is inside sites folder. Due to Drupal’s multi-site support, we have have individual themes available for the sites installed in the installation. Those themes need to be put under their respective sites to make them available. Sounds too boring! Let me come to point.

The recommended custom theme location in Drupal is under sites/all/themes/ folder.

Drupal Theme Administration

You need to have proper permissions to change the theme of your Drupal site. To change the default drupal theme, login to the site and then go to Theme Administration found under Site Building – Themes. The default url for the theme administration is /admin/build/themes.

By default, the garland theme is selected. The folder name of each theme represents its name on the administration page (Configurable name and description available in Drupal 6). You can change the theme by simply clicking the radio box of that theme found under default column. Saving the changes will result in applying of new theme to the site.

You can make configuration changes to the theme by clicking on the configure button found on that row. A list of default configuration options will be displayed where we can do the necessary. You can toggle the display of various page elements like search box, site name, logo, site slogan, shortcut icon, user pictures etc from this page. You can add your custom options also for the theme like in case of color picker for default garland theme.

How theme works

Drupal theme essentially consists of two files; a template file (page.tpl.php in case of phpTemplate) and a CSS file for presentation. A template file is a mix of HTML or XHTML markup alongwith the templating language specific code. Drupal by default supports PHPTemplate as the templating language through use of PHPTemplate theme engine. Theme engines control how certain themes interact with Drupal. In addition to PHPTemplate, Drupal has support for many other popular templating engines through installation of their theme engines. A theme engine makes many variables avaialable to template files and processes these template pages to render output.

In the next post of this series, I will be writing about ‘How to develop Drupal 5 theme’.