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Theming Drupal lesson 1 Readme file Zen theme

17/04/2025, by Ivan

Where to Start?

Hooray! You’ve opened the right file first. The first thing people notice when they download the Zen theme is that it contains far more files than other themes.

Don’t worry! You don’t need to know everything right away to create a Drupal theme.

Zen will give you more than you knew you needed and will patiently wait as you study the documentation and comments about it.

What are Base Themes, Sub-themes, and Starter Themes?

Often the best way to learn a system is by taking existing examples and modifying them to see how things work. One big drawback of this method is that if something breaks and the original example worked before you broke it, there's little incentive for others to help you fix it.

Drupal’s theming system has a solution: parent themes and sub-themes. A “sub-theme” inherits all the HTML markup, CSS, and PHP code from its “parent theme” (also known as the base theme). With Drupal themes, it’s easy for a sub-theme to override only the parts of the parent theme you want to change.

A “starter theme” is a sub-theme designed specifically as a good starting point for building your own custom site theme. It’s usually paired with a base theme.

So How Do You Create a Theme with Zen?

The Zen theme includes both the Zen base theme and a starter sub-theme called "STARTERKIT." You should not modify any of the CSS or PHP files in the Zen folder directly. Instead, create your sub-theme based on Zen and place it in a directory outside the main Zen folder.

Installation

If you’re not sure how to install a Drupal theme, there is a quick setup guide later in this document.

Creating a Theme with Zen

See the STARTERKIT/README.txt file for full instructions.

The .info Theme File

Your sub-theme’s .info file contains key information about your theme—its name, description, features, region templates, CSS files, and JavaScript. Don’t worry about understanding every line just yet.

CSS

After creating your sub-theme, take a look at the README.txt file in your sub-theme’s CSS directory.

Don’t be overwhelmed by all the files in that directory—just read the README.txt for clarification.

Templates

Now take a look at the README.txt file in your sub-theme’s templates folder.