Look and Feel: Using Themes in Drupal

Within the Drupal Web content management system, using themes allows you to brand content that is driven by the system's back-end. This provides a user-friendly front-end to the database-driven back-end, allowing content to be separated from presentation and enabling you to alter the look and feel of a site with minimal rework. Your Drupal site may be themed to match your company's existing brand identity, or you may choose to have several different themes for multiple sites within your Drupal environment.

Theming begins with comps, or designs provided by the client or Web design firm. These designs (often in Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator format) are translated into CSS and HTML in a process called Web slicing. The "slices" are turned into templates that are then applied to content stored in the Drupal database.

The flexibility offered by Drupal theming allows for a number of different customizations. For example, Drupal offers a module that allows a user to change the colors in the CSS via a page in the administrator interface, enabling a user to modify the look and feel of the site with very little technical knowledge. Of course, access controls can be applied to these types of changes, so that only users with administrator-level privileges will be able to change the site's appearance. Drupal's advanced permission controls also allow different themes to be applied for different users depending on their roles, so that different users can see different content or functionality.

DPCI’s themes adhere to Web standards and accessibility specifications, ensuring that your content reaches the broadest audience possible. Much of the logic behind theming is built into Drupal out-of-box, optimizing the theme development time. DPCI can help you maximize the flexibility of Drupal themes according to your specific needs. In addition to a comprehensive portfolio of successful Drupal projects, we work with award-winning design teams, marrying utility with aesthetics.