Bb RealTech

Before jumping into Drupal theming, it's important to understand how the Drupal theming infrastructure works. The Drupal web site has good documentation on Drupal themes but I wanted to cover those aspects that differ from my experiences with Wordpress—if for no other reason to document what I've learned for when I add new sites.

Like Wordpress, dynamic content is embedded as PHP within page templates, and similar to WP there are the main sections that handle the header, footer, sidebars, and main content. However, the similarity between the two begins to end at this point.

A relatively typical Drupal page consists of left and right sidebars, center content, header and footer. I borrowed the following image from the Drupal theme guide, which shows these sections mapped out.

Unlike Wordpress, with separate header, footer, and sidebar pages, the page.tpl.php file shown in the diagram pulls together all of the content that is displayed in the page. However, there is very limited processing within this page: typically just a condition to check to see if section data exists and a PHP print statement to print out the section data. The following is the template code that manages the post displays from RealTech's page.tpl.php file, which is a sub-scheme of the default Drupal Garland theme:

<div class="clear-block">
   <?php print $content ?>
</div>

Unlike Wordpress, there is no loop to manage the output. Instead, the only code is the statement to print out the global $content variable, which is processed within the PHP templating engine. The same applies for sidebars, headers, and footers, as the following code snippet demonstrates for the left sidebar:

<?php if ($left): ?>
  <div id="sidebar-left" class="sidebar">
  <?php if ($search_box): ?><div class="block block-theme"><?php print $search_box ?></div><?php endif; ?>
 <?php print $left ?>
 </div>
<?php endif; ?>

Whether there is any left content or not is dependent on another important Drupal theming concept: blocks.