A modular approach to Drupal theming: part 1
If you’re anything like us you love how modular Drupal is — it’s certainly one of the aspects that most attracted us to Drupal in the first place. A typical site starts with a small, minimal core to which you can add a multitude of contributed modules to create the finished site.
This has many obvious advantages, for example:
- a site builder can achieve very specific functionality that nobody else may have required or even thought of
- impressive sites can be built by people with no coding experience, by piecing together the right combination of useful bits (modules) and configuring them in clever ways
A large part of what has made this possible on the module side of the story is Drupal’s focus on its API — a set of reusable functions which can be pulled together quickly and relatively easily by module developers to produce the desired unique finished module. Modules which leverage the API well can work together with other modules, and can even themselves be modified by future modules in ways the original programmer never imagined.
Likewise Drupal offers a great API for theme developers with loads of useful theme-related functions they can call to pull things together on the theme end.
Unfortunately, while a typical contributed module allows a site builder to configure things to their liking, a typical contributed theme hides all the power of the Drupal theme API. Only developers get to use the good stuff!
Live Themer aims to step in and fill that gap. In a future post we'll share some of how it does just that.
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