Themes are among the most powerful and flexible features available when it comes to the presentation of a website. The greatest strength of Drupal lies in its design, which, when done correctly, allows developers and designers to customize and micromanage each and every aspect of the site. Furthermore, the Drupal theming system and its APIs allow for the design of custom themes that are easy to administer and maintain.

This book provides a plethora of solutions that enable Drupal theme designers to make full use of all its features and its inherent extensibility to style their sites just the way they want to. It covers numerous aspects from using contributed and custom themes to leveraging the powerful Fields API introduced in Drupal 7 along with the Views and Panels modules to create rich designs and layouts that are easy to administer and maintain.

Structured as a collection of recipes to perform a wide variety of practical tasks, this book will systematically guide readers towards solutions that are central to Drupal theming. Each recipe is divided into the following sections:

* An Introduction that explains what the recipe is about * Getting ready lists any prerequisite steps required for the recipe to work * How to do it describes how to implement the recipe * How it works explains how the recipe works * There's more catalogs useful information related to the recipe

While it is recommended that readers follow the recipes in each chapter in sequence, it is also possible to sift through the recipes at random. Special attention should always be paid to the Getting ready section of each recipe, which provides information on preliminary steps that need to be performed, and in some cases, specify if the recipe builds on the result of earlier recipes in the same chapter.