Theming

If you develop for Drupal 9, you probably noticed that theming has improved a lot. And if you're upgrading your theme to D9, given Drupal 7's upcoming end of life in November 2022, you'll find the job considerably easier if you follow some basic but crucial steps.

Let's look at the main theming features on Drupal 9 and how to have your Drupal 7 theme ready for this latest version of Drupal.

There’s always a desire to start from scratch. Whether it’s the development team saying that the architecture is fundamentally flawed, the design team looking to add a new brand system, or the leadership team looking to make a big impact or justify a budget-spend, starting a digital project from scratch is appealing. 

And sometimes starting over is justified—for example:

After many years of development, Bootstrap had an official 4.0 release on January 18th, 2018. Bootstrap has been a popular front-end framework for several years and the release of the new version is really exciting! This post outlines a few of the differences between Bootstrap 3 and Bootstrap 4.

As a Drupal themer, it's rare that I choose something other than the Bootstrap base theme for a new project. Besides its quality and popularity, there are some specific technical reasons why Bootstrap is such an attractive option.

There are many ways of building sites and themes - be it Drupal, Wordpress, Magento or any Content Management System. In my particular case, after nine years of building Drupal themes, reading how other themers do it, and learning from my mistakes, I came up with a few tips I would like to share with everyone.

Since the release of Drupal 8, Drupal 6 is no longer supported by the Drupal Community. Because of this, many sites need to be migrated to Drupal 7 or 8, and quickly!

That means that at Evolving Web we've been doing a lot of Drupal migration projects lately. I would like to talk about the things we have to take into account when running these projects.

Whenever we start a new Drupal project, we have to choose what kind of theme we're going to create. Are we going to use a framework like Bootstrap or Zurb Foundation? If so, do we start with a contrib base theme or do we implement the framework ourselves? Are we going to use a classic Drupal base theme like Zen or AdaptiveTheme? Or are we going to build the theme 'from scratch' starting with Drupal core or a core base theme? 

One of the first questions I get asked when teaching a Drupal theming class is which base theme to use. The answer has always starts with the unsatisfying: "It depends". Now that I'm teaching Drupal 8 theming, we have a couple new base themes in core added to the mix: classy and stable.

You can learn the difference between the two and how to use them in this previous post.

Updated on June 15, 2022

You might think that using the drush command-line tool is only something hardcore developers do, but it turns out it's super-helpful for site builders and theme developers too! In my experience, using drush will speed up the usual Drupal Admin tasks 3 to 10 times, compared with visiting the Drupal admin pages in the browser. 

What are SASS and Compass and why and how would I use them? Don't worry, we'll guide you through the process of using SASS with your Drupal 8 theme.