How to Build a Custom Theme for Drupal 8

1.2 Prerequisites

Let's take a few moment to talk a little bit about what this course is, what it isn't and some of the prerequisites and things you are going to need to make your life in learning about Drupal 8 themes a little bit easier. The first thing, what is this course? Well, this course is an introduction into the world of building custom themes in Drupal. Now building custom themes in Drupal, and specifically Drupal 8 is a very broad topic. There is an awful lot of information to learn about and to digest, and I'm gonna be showing you some of the basics to help you understand the building blocks of themes and how to get in and out of them. And more importantly, I'm gonna teach you how to not only find the documentation that you need in order to tweak certain things, but I'm also gonna show you some cool little tips and tricks that you can use to look at other themes and figure out where certain information is being styled. How can I apply CSS to every single page? How can I tweak the header? How can I do things like that? Because those types of skills are what's really going to make your transition into building your own themes instead of just downloading existing themes, a little bit easier. So we're gonna touch on a lot of those types of things. And that is what this course is based around. Now what this course isn't, is it is not a web design course. I'm not going to teach you the ins and outs of HTML and CSS and JavaScript. I really hope by this point, you have at least a decent understanding of those concepts. If you don't, it's not a big deal. We're not learning about themes in Drupal to build a beautiful theme right out of the box. What we're learning is the fundamentals. If you want to learn more about building beautiful sites, and web design, and HTML, and CSS, and JavaScript then I highly recommend that you head over to webdesign.textplus.com and take a look at some of the courses, and tutorials, and learning guides that we have on that site. There is a plethora of information out there and it is all at your fingertips so I highly recommend you going there and learning a little bit more about the aesthetics of building beautiful sites. Then, once you are comfortable with that or at least ready to dive into the world of Drupal themes, then feel free to come back. Now, the next thing that you're going to need is an installation of Drupal that you can get your hands on. Now, there's definitely a couple of different ways that you can do that. If you followed along with my previous course, the beginners guide to building sites with Drupal, then you probably noticed that I forewent the idea of installing something locally and I just used a hosted version so I could make things accessible to the outside world. And it was kinda nice to see how you can do this in a hosted situation because ultimately, that's our goal. We wanna be able to build websites and if we're using Drupal, we wanna build Drupal sites and have them accessible to the outside world. And so that's why I chose to go the hosted cloud solution route, and I showed you how to do that in the first couple of lessons in the introduction section of that course. Now you can follow along in this course using that same installation if you would like. But there is a bit of a caveat there. The problem you're gonna run into is in order to follow along in this course, and work with themes, and debug, and make tweaks and refresh, and make sure everything is doing what you want it to do, it's gonna involve a lot of back and forth and uploading using FTP site or however you want to get your files up to the server. And then there's a little bit of time that goes into making those round trips. You can absolutely do it, I'm not saying that you can't. But I'm just saying that it might be a little bit easier for you if you were to run something locally. So if you wanna follow along in the cloud that's absolutely fine. I did use Digital Ocean last time, I think they have a really nice setup for their apps where you can deploy installations of a lot of popular software out there, including Drupal as you can see here. With a single click, and it's just up and running, and it's ready for you to use right out of the box, you can absolutely do that. For this course, I might recommend going the other route and heading over to drupal.org, and taking a look at their documentation, specifically the Drupal 8 installation guide. And in here, it's going to show you the ins and outs of how you install it locally, the different versions of PHP, and all these different things that you're going to need in order to successfully get Drupal 8 up and running locally. And I highly recommend you following along throughout this guide. Now, I do want to say that in this course, I am using a local installation. As you can see here, I have this running on local host, port 8888, under the Drupal subdirectory here. And this probably looks very familiar to you if you followed along with my previous course. If you didn't, it's not that big of a deal, but it will make your life a little bit easier if you wanna be able to start designing themes and getting into the world of building themes if you really understand the Drupal product itself. So definitely take a look at that. Now, I will tell you that if you wanna install it locally, I would highly recommend using some sort of stack, some sort of Apache- MySQL- PHP stack. So in this case, I'm actually using MAMP locally. So I'm using My Apache, MySQL, and PHP. And this really is kind of a nice situation where it will set up a lot of the things that you need out of the box. It will set up A MySQL instance. It will install PHP. It will get Apache up and running and it's highly configurable, very easy to use, very easy to download and it's kinda nice because all of the requirements for Drupal 8 at least from a versioning perspective of MySQL, PHP and things like that are met by using the latest version of MAMP. So if you wanna install it locally, I highly recommend using some sort of MAMP stack if you will. Like I said, I'm using MAMP, but just about anything out there, I think should probably work. And the final thing that you're going to need to follow along in this course is a decent text editor. You can use an IDE if you would like, but I really think that that would be probably wasted on something like this. A really high quality text editor will do the job just fine. In my case, I'm gonna be using Atom. I tend to like this text editor for many, many reasons, but one of the main reasons I like it for a course like this is that it allows me to very quickly navigate a directory structure and get quick access to files in a snap. And that's really a time saver in a course like this in following along because I don't have to leave my text editor, for the most part. Every once in a while, you may have to. But for the most part, you can live within your text editor, you can browse the directory structures, you can get access to files, and do everything that you need to do in one place. So once again, I recommend if not Atom itself, a text editor that's like it, that has similar functionality. So once you have kind of digested all of that, and you understand where it is we are, what we want to try to achieve, and we get our installation of Drupal up and running, and whatever tools that we're ready to use ready to go. Then you are absolutely ready to start diving into the world of Drupal 8 themes.