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Installing and configuring a Drupal 7 Sub-theme - 3 of 3

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Update: If you are looking for a written article, check out Master your Drupal Sub Theme.

In the final video of the 3 part series, we look at creating and configuring a Drupal sub-theme. Specifically, we will be created a sub-theme based off of the Zen theme. If you aren’t familiar with Zen, it is a very popular base theme used by thousands of designers as a starting point when building a custom website theme.

So what is a base theme? A base theme is simply a theme that's default stylings can be used IF the sub-theme doesn’t override it. In other words, a base theme provides the frame of the house and a custom sub-theme provides the finishes. You might be thinking why not just modify the Zen base theme. While you COULD do this, it is NOT recommended. The main reason you would avoid this idea is because when Zen gets updated by the community and you want to pull in those new changes (updates) you will override all of your custom work within those files. That is not good. If however you use a sub-theme updates will never occur, unless you yourself do them.

In the video, I walk you through getting both a zen base and sub-theme created. During this video, you will learn which files need to be modified to correctly tie in your sub-theme with Zen. Lastly, I will show you how you can add template files (the files that control the structure of the site) to your sub-theme. Knowing how to modify these files is crucial to being able to have complete control over the structure of your website.

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