Drupal 7 Theme System Changes

The new Drupal 7 theming system is a little more complex than Drupal 6… but at the same time, it’s simpler and represents best practice UI style methods for Drupal Theming. There are approximately 50 changes in Drupal 7 themes including:

• Html.tpl.php is the new page wrapper for your theme
• Granular display of $content info in node.tpl.php
  • In laymans terms, you can pull fields out of your template’s $content output and display them in a more controlled way
• Search templates in the theme are gone. Search is now in a block!
• Templates now use a “--“ delimiter rather than “-“
  • This allows you to use hyphens in template names: node--press-releases.tpl.php

Upgrading to a Drupal 7 theme pretty much means you’ll need to rebuild it from the bottom up.  I will be discussing that in a subsequent blog.