Chapter 4: Theming

The most obvious part of Drupal's theming system is the Appearance admin page found at admin/appearance, which lists all the themes installed on your website:

Figure 4.1: Appearance admin page

When you choose a theme from the Appearance page, you are applying a specific graphic design to your website's data and functionality. However, the applied theme is in reality only a small part of the entire theming layer.

This book focuses mostly on building modules that encapsulate chunks of functionality. However, since we're ultimately building a web application, everything output by our functionality will need to be marked up with HTML. In Drupal, this process of wrapping data in HTML and CSS is called theming.

In this chapter, we will discuss how our module integrates with the theme layer. We will talk about the architecture of the system, theme templates, hooks, render arrays, and others. Then, we will provide some practical examples.

The major topics we will cover in the chapter are as follows:

• Theme hooks, templates, and suggestions
• Render arrays and layouts
• Assets and libraries
• Theming our Hello World module using the lessons learned