Building the theme

Your custom theme and its associated files will be contained in the sites/all/themes folder with the name of your theme (mytheme). Never change files outside of your theme directory as these changes will not be migrated to production.

For more information on theming, view the Drupal 7 theming guide for specifics.

Base Themes

YaleSites includes Zen, AdaptiveTheme, and Omega as base themes for your site. We recommend creating a sub-theme from one of the base themes when you create your custom theme.

Subtheming from a YaleSites theme

In addition, any of the YaleSites themes (Yale Standard, Yale Boxed, Yale Wide) can be used as a starter theme and duplicated. This provides a good starting point for your custom theme. The YaleSites themes use the Omega base theme, a flexible interface that provides all the regions necessary to build a dynamic site and follows the typeface standards set by the University Printer. See YaleSites Starter Documentation for more information.

Creating Layouts with Delta and Context

You can also create additional layouts for the YaleSites Templates using the Delta and Content Modules.

drupal.org Support

Creating your custom theme requires advanced technical skills. Please consult the drupal.org documentation, support options or User Groups to find a solution. If you have found a bug please file a bug report. Or even better, provide a patch file to fix the problem. If there is a module you need, please request it on the YaleSites Forum. All requests will be considered providing they do not create redundancy with functionality that already exists.

Important notes on creating a custom theme

Be sure to rename your theme to a descriptive name that matches your site.
Do not add SQL to your theme to build dynamic content. Themes are for display only. Use the Views module instead to create lists of content.

Hiding your theme from other sites

Since every YaleSite is derived from the same code base, your theme sits alongside other custom themes for other sites. Read more about hiding your theme from other sites.

Creating Multiple Layouts with Delta and Context

For basic layout changes we strongly recommend using the Delta and Context modules rather than adding custom template files.

Delta and Context allows you to create multiple layouts without physically touching a .tpl file in your Omega theme. For example, each of the YaleSites Templates has a home page without a Sidebar First region. This was done by rearranging the regions and creating a Delta without the SideBar First region. Then a Context module was used to assign the Delta to only be used on the Home page.

Omega 3 Theme Regions

YaleSites templates only take advantage of a few of the regions available in the Omega 3 Theme. Prior to creating additional layouts, it is important to understand all of the regions available so you can determine how best to create a new layout. The image below provides a grid with all the regions. You can find this grid on your YaleSite in the following way:

Click on Structure > Blocks in the main Toolbar (black across the top).
Click on the Omega tab (upper right).
Click on Demonstrate Block Regions.