Themes

A Drupal theme is the engine that provides the framework for the visual layout and design of your site, including bringing together the CSS, JavaScript, images, and colors. A Drupal theme itself determines the visual design of the website you are building.

In the standard install, there are a number of basic themes provided, and you can switch between them at any time.

The Standard profile installation ships with the Bartik theme. This theme is comprised of 17 page regions into which you can place one or more blocks. The 17 regions are shown in the following diagram:

As you can see from the preceding diagram, the list of default regions for the Bartik theme and their relative positions on the page is enough to fill the layout of many sites.

Page and theme template regions will be covered in detail in Chapter 13, Theming Drupal.

Just as with modules, you can download themes from https://www.drupal.org/ or you can create your own.

All themes have a settings page allowing you to change certain elements of the display, for example the color scheme used or whether to display the site logo and name. More complex themes have a greater range of settings within them.

Administration themes

There are also themes that are designed for use when visiting administrative pages, such as when managing users or create actual content. Themes such as these are known as administration themes or admin themes for short.

Drupal 8 ships with Seven as its admin theme.

A lot of effort has been made in Drupal 8 to ensure that admin themes work well on mobile devices allowing you to edit your content while on the move.

Base themes and subthemes

Some themes are not designed as finished products, but instead as starting points for your own theme development. These are commonly referred to as base themes. You can, and should, extend and override a base theme by creating a subtheme.

Themes will be covered in more detail in Chapter 13, Theming Drupal.