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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T08:00:04+00:00

I’m interested in creating a custom theme for a Drupal site I’m working on.

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I’m interested in creating a custom theme for a Drupal site I’m working on. I am new to Drupal, however I have a decent bit of experience in working with the underlying concepts that it seems are needed to build a theme (CSS, PHP, HTML).
So, my question is – where do I start? Is there a canonical guide to creating Drupal themes? Resources that I should be aware of (other than the Theming Guide)? Gotchas that others have encountered, or just general words of wisdom from those who are more experienced?

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  1. Editorial Team

    The best way to do it is to start with a theme, and modify it bit by bit. That’s how most of the people whom I know do it. You take the themes/garland directory and copy it to sites/all/themes/garland-modified, then you change a few things in it to reflect the new change (in principle you rename the .info file to the new directory location and you edit it to change garland to your new directory), then you go bit by bit and change things in the files to reflect your design.

    This may seem tedious and a waste of time (why not just start from scratch?) but you have several advantages:

    • you start with a working theme
    • you start with a complete theme, wich everything you may want
    • you don’t risk of forgetting pieces which are required to have a working site

    There are starter kits which are supposed to make things easier (see the zen theme for example) which you basically edit in a similar way I outlined above. But I found them a bit harder to understand…

    Good luck with Drupal theming 🙂

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