Creating an OpenScholar theme

Themes are HTML, CSS and Javascript that control the overall look and feel of an OpenScholar site. Every individual OpenScholar site has a theme, and like the famous CSS Zen Garden site, these themes can display the same content in completely different ways.

Developing a Theme

Custom themes for OpenScholar sites are Drupal themes that are sub-themes of the 'os_base' theme. You can create clean and compact CSS by choosing to keep whichever defaults from the base theme you want. We therefore recommend becoming familiar with the markup we provide and with the default CSS. This can be done in the usual ways (we recommend using Firefox and the Firebug extension) but here we also provide some general background.

The base theme uses a markup structure that was featured back in a 2006 issue of the online magazine A List Apart. We recommend you familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of the 'Holy Grail' layout.

Beyond your custom CSS and images you'll also need a customized '.info' file. The .info file (example: 'mytheme.info') resides with your CSS in your theme folder. It is a proprietary Drupal file which instructs the system where to find your theme's name, CSS file, whether there are theme 'flavor' variants, and whether you prefer to have certain widgets custom enabled.