Sub Theme information needs clarification

Created on 22 March 2011, about 14 years ago
Updated 19 March 2025, 20 days ago

I had some confusion when attempting to create a sub-theme (in D7) using the documentation at http://drupal.org/node/225125. Hopefully my comments below can help to clarify this for others (as it took me several conversations with others and combing through comments to figure this information out).

First Note for the Style Sheet Inheritance section it states:
"All style sheets defined in the parent theme will be inherited, as long as you declare at least one stylesheet in your sub-theme's .info file. You must declare at least one stylesheet in your sub-theme for any of the parent theme's stylesheets to be inherited."

Due to this statement, I had copied the stylesheet information from the main theme .info file (in my case Bartik) to my .info file. This resulted in a themeless sub-theme. When I removed all the stylesheet information from the sub-theme .info file, the sub-theme worked as I expected (it looked like the parent theme). If you must have a line in the .info file for a stylesheet as that paragraph implies, then also make it evident in that sentence that the user should copy of the .css file being declared from the parent must also be in the sub-theme directory. Or, if you no longer need to declare a stylesheet in D7 (as seems to be the case), add a statement explaining so.

Second Note in the Region inheritance section:
"Sub-themes do not inherit custom regions from a parent theme. If you are using custom regions, you should copy the region declarations from the parent theme's .info file. Be sure your sub-theme's page.tpl.php file matches the sub-theme's region settings."

This statement is fine, though I glossed over it. Perhaps there is a way to emphasize this section more, and in the next page (Structure of the .info file - http://drupal.org/node/171205) use a theme that uses regions for the example so it stands out there as well.

Hopefully this will help others to avoid the time sink I went through, and feel free to let me know if you have any questions.

πŸ“Œ Task
Status

Closed: outdated

Component

Correction/Clarification

Created by

πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡ΈUnited States Brakash

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