Customizing the interface

When launching a new drupal site, here are some things you can do to personalize the design and architecture of your drupal site.

• Choose a Theme.

  The look and feel of Drupal is primarily controlled by the theme you have applied to your site. A site can even have multiple themes. A good first step is to go to administer > themes and set a new theme as your default. You can find more themes on the download page after the list of modules. Once you download a new theme you will need to install it on your system.

• Create your own Theme.

  Many Drupal sites will need a more unique look than these pre-built themes can offer. Therefore, many developers will want to write their own themes. Theme development requires a working knowledge of HTML/CSS and possibly some rudimentary PHP depending on the complexity of your theme.

• Customize the Navigation.

  The menus that are displayed on the top and bottom of the page are configured in administer > themes. Select the configure tab and scroll down to Menu Settings. The primary and secondary links can be defined here, using straight HTML. If the primary links are left blank your navigation will be created based on your installed modules.

  Each theme has an individual configuration page (listed at the top of the global settings page) as well. Unfortunately, in Drupal 4.6 and previous using PHPTemplate your navigation must be defined in that theme's individual theme area.

  In 4.7 PHPTemplate engine is incorporated into the Drupal core and the Primary and Secondary links are now part of the menu system. Mention of this can be found here.

• Customize Text Strings

  You can also change the text strings throughout drupal using the locale feature, which was designed for running drupal in different languages, you can personalize almost all of the text in drupal.

  In fact, you can replace a string like "create blog entry" with html markup such as references to graphics.