Modifying Drupal Themes with Dreamweaver CS5
This article walks you through how to use new tools in Dreamweaver CS5 to customize themes in Drupal. In the process, you'll learn how to connect two of the most powerful tools for website management and web page design.
The Drupal-Dreamweaver Partnership
Like other content management systems (CMS) such as Joomla and WordPress, Drupal essentially does two things:
- Sets up a server database into which contributors post content, and from which content gets packaged into views and displayed on web pages
- Provides tools (called themes in Drupal) to define site-wide formatting[md]page background colors, fonts, link formatting, and so on
Drupal is free and open source, with extensive and accessible user and developer communities that offer great resources, demonstrations, and tutorials.
Dreamweaver CS5, the other partner in this process, provides unparalleled ability to define and format the external Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) files that can be used to control the look and feel of websites. CSS controls everything from font size and color to page background and layouts. What makes the connection work is that Drupal themes are based on CSS files, and Dreamweaver CS5 has some rather exciting new features that detect and connect to CSS files associated with Drupal websites. (You can also use Dreamweaver to manage database connections generated by Drupal, but that feature is beyond the scope of this tutorial.)