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Customizing a theme

In this section, after we have elected our primary theme, we will go step-by-step customizing it and making it suit our business need. These configurations are necessary even if you choose to hire a designer or buy a ready-made theme.

Changing basic elements

Every Drupal theme using the template engine produces HTML code from Drupal core objects. Therefore, some content of the final HTML code generated is actually site-wide property such as site slogan, mission, and site name. We will have to change Drupal default settings and provide our business details. To do this, go to Home | Administer | Site configuration and edit the fields as we describe next. If you do not want to provide specific information, for instance if you do not have a corporate slogan, you need not fill this option. Nothing will appear if the attribute is not set to the main page of your online shop.

Drupal and Ubercart 2.x Theming

You can edit the following elements:

  • Name: This is your site’s name and will be displayed in the site name theme section and can also be a part of the HTML <title> element.
  • E-mail address: A valid e-mail address for your website, used by the mailer functionality during registration, new password requests, notifications, purchases, and all mail communication to your users. E-mail server details that your site uses are placed in your php.ini file. The majority of web hosting solutions have a preconfi gured mail server environment and you will not have to deal with it.
  • Slogan: The slogan of your website. Some themes display a slogan when available. It will also display in the title bar of your user web browser, so if you decide to choose one, do it wisely.
  • Mission: Your site’s mission statement or focus. Your mission statement is enabled in your theme settings and requires that the theme supports its display.
  • Footer: This text will be displayed at the bottom of each page. Useful for adding a copyright notice to your pages. You can also use HTML tags to include an image for instance.
  • Anonymous user: The user name for unregistered users is “Anonymous” by default. Drupal gives you the option to change this to something different according to your target user group (for example “New Customer”).
  • Default front page: This setting gives site administrators control over what Drupal-generated content a user sees when they visit a Drupal installation’s root directory.

We quote from the Drupal documentation section for site configuration:

This setting tells Drupal which URL users should be redirected to. It’s important to note that the URL is relative to the directory your Drupal installation is in. So, instead of
“http://www.example.com/node/83”
or
“http://www.example.com/drupal_installation_directory/node/83,”
it is only necessary to type “node/83”. For those not using clean URLs, note that there is no need to type in “?q=” before typing the URL.
By default, the “Default front page” is set to “node,” which simply displays articles that have been “Promoted to front page.” Note that when changing the “Default front page” to something other than “node”, nodes that are “Promoted to front page” will no longer appear on the front page. They can however, still be viewed by visiting the relative URL path “node”.
If the path specified is not a valid Drupal path the user will be confronted with a “Page not found” error. It is not possible to redirect users to any web documents (e.g. a static HTML page) not created by the Drupal site.

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