Like other CMS platforms, Drupal allows us to create custom themes and templates. In this tutorial, you’re going to learn how to create a new theme and defining or configuring a theme in Drupal 7.

Theme Structure

To define a new theme in Drupal 7, you need to create folders and files according to Drupal’s rule.

So, we start by create the following folders:

Go to root folder of Drupal > Sites > All > Theme and create theme folders as below:

• mytheme is the folder that contains themes and can be renamed to your theme’s name.
• mytheme.info is file used to define theme name, version, core ,css, javascript.
• screenshot.png is thumbnail of theme, which is showed in theme management section.

Defining theme using .info file

The .info file is a static text file for defining and configuring a theme. Each line in the .info file is a key-value pair with the key on the left and the value on the right, with an “equals sign” between them (eg:   name = my_theme ).

Now, open mytheme.info and start defining:

Theme name (required):

name = mytheme

Description:

description = tutorialdrupal.com how to create and define drupal theme

Theme version

version = 0.1

Core drupal

core = 7.x

Engine

engine = phptemplate

Screenshot

screenshot = screenshot.png

After finishing, we will have a new .info  file like this:
name = mytheme
description = tutorialdrupal.com how to create and define drupal theme
version = 0.1
core = 7.x
engine = phptemplate
screenshot = screenshot.png

Now save the file, go to theme management section, you will see the new theme you’ve just created:

Defining Drupal website’s regions

Region is section for showing Drupal website’s blocks. Regions are defined as follows:

regions[header] = Header
regions[highlighted] = Highlighted
regions[help] = Help
regions[content] = Content
regions[sidebar_first] = Left sidebar
regions[sidebar_second] = Right sidebar
regions[footer] = Footer

After you’re done, save the file and click on “enable and set default” to set this theme as default theme. Now go to Structure -> Block, you will see the new defined regions:

1. Include css file

stylesheets[all][] = style.css
stylesheets[print][] = print.css

2. Include javascript file

scripts[] = myscript.js

So, you’ve just created a new theme in Drupal 7. It's not a difficult task, right?

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Sometimes when working with Drupal, you suddenly see this error: 
Allowed memory size of A bytes exhausted (tried to allocate B bytes)
or
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 3669969 bytes) in ../public_html/includes/theme.inc on line 1987

How to handle this error? That error message tells you that Drupal needed more memory than PHP was allowed to give it. In this article, I will explain to you 3 methods to increase PHP memory size, pick one that you like:

1. Fix the error in Drupal 6/7 using php.ini file

You will probably see this error message when you install new modules/themes. By default, Drupal 6/7 allocates 64M (megabytes) of memory on your website and so, to fix this issue you need to increase memory limit to higher value (128MB is fine).

Here is the solution:

1. Connect to your Drupal web hosting using SSH/FTP connection

2. Check if there’s php.ini  file in root folder of your hosting

3. If it’s existing, open the file with text editor (notepad) and add the value  php_value memory_limit = "128M"

4. If there’s no  php.ini file in root folder, then you need to create one. Use notepate, wordpad or whatever can edit and save text file as .ini  file add the value  php_value memory_limit = "128M"

5. Save the file if check the error’s gone

(Note: remember to save file with name: php.ini, not php.ini.txt)

2. Increase PHP memory using .httaccess

Edit the .htaccess file in the Drupal root directory. Look for the section:

Override PHP settings. More in sites/default/settings.php

But the following cannot be changed at runtime

Now add the following line:
php_value memory_limit 64M
This method will only work if PHP is running as an Apache module.

3. Using settings.php

If Drupal is already installed, you can edit sites/default/settings.php. This method will affect only the site using this file.
Locate the PHP settings section and add the following line at the end of that section:
ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

That’s all for today, hope you will solve this issue immediately after reading this!

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Try our Drupal CMS with Free ASP.NET Hosting today and your account will be setup soon! You can also take advantage of our Windows & ASP.NET Hosting support with Unlimited Domain, Unlimited Bandwidth, Unlimited Disk Space, etc. You will not be charged a cent for trying our service for the next 3 days. Once your trial period is complete, you decide whether you'd like to continue.