andrew.eatherington : websitemaker

As with many things in Drupal there are different approaches to achieve the same, or similar, goal. Styling, or theming, are the same in this respect although the approach taken is often governed, but not always, by experience. In this article I will look at the easiest and most basic way of styling a Drupal site, showing that even if you have very little experience you can have a great looking site in no time at all.

The easiest way to theme your site is an off-the-peg solution. These can be found in the themes section at drupal.org. Here you can find a cornucopia of ready made themes and it is simply a case of downloading, extracting the theme from the zip file and uploading them to a designated folder on your site. They then become available in your themes administration page so that you can apply a theme to your site.

Let's go through that step-by-step. 

1. Browse the themes pages and find a suitable theme. There are previews of the theme alongside the listings to give you an idea of what they look like - the thumbnail and title on the listing clicks through to that theme's project page. Although you can download the necessary files from the listings page, it's worthwhile checking the project page to read the features and any notes from the developers. You can choose as many themes as you like, as they can be enabled and disabled once they are available in your site
2. Download the theme from the download area, ensuring that you only download the version that is compatible with your version of Drupal.
3. Log-in to your site with your ftp client and navigate from the root to the sites/all folder. In the 'all' folder create, if you haven't already, a folder called 'themes'.
4. Unzipping the theme package you have downloaded will give you a folder with the theme name which will contain all of the files for that theme. Upload this folder to the your themes folder (sites/all/themes/). If you have a local copy of your site (highly recommended) copy the folder there first and then upload.
5. In your browser, navigate to http://www.example.com/admin/build/themes/select. Here you will find all of the themes available to your site. Select the checkboxes of the themes you want to enable and select a radio button of the theme you want to apply to your site.

In the themes admin pages, you can configure various options such as the visibility of the logo, site name (text), mission statement and many others. There is the default configuration which applies to all themes, and a theme configuration which overrides the default settings. Some settings are only available in the default or global configuration.

Another option is the ability to have a different theme for the admin pages. This can be set on http://www.example.com/admin/settings/admin.