Specifying theme components and settings

This section explains how to specify the structure of a theme, the theme region names, the style sheets, and the JavaScript by editing the settings in a configuration file, commonly called the ".info" file. The .info file can also specify which theme settings should be accessed from the Drupal administration interface.

Because the .info file is cached, you must clear the cache before any changes are displayed in your site.

About the .info file

In Drupal 6, every theme must have a .info file in its directory. Without this file, a theme will not be visible to Drupal. The .info file must end with the ".info" extension.

The internal "machine" readable name of the theme is derived from this file. For example, if the file is named "drop.info", then Drupal will see the name of the theme as "drop". Be sure that no odd characters are used, since it tells Drupal how to form various functions in PHP and therefore it will have the same limitations. The name should start with an alphabetic character and contain no spaces or punctuation. Underscores are allowed but not hyphens. Numbers are allowed as long as a number is not the first character.

Notes:

• Warning! Modules bearing the same internal name as a theme can prevent a site from functioning. This may cause duplicate function names, which are illegal in PHP. All installed components must have unique names. For locally created themes using a prefix that is likely to be unique is good for theme naming. A site example.com might call its themes ex_themename.