Themes

Now that you've installed Drupal, you'll probably want to change how it looks.  Drupal utilizes "Themes" to control how your site looks.  A theme is essentially a skin for your website and consists of some template files and stylesheets. 

You can download a bunch of ready-made user-contributed themes at http://drupal.org/project/Themes.  Drupal users create these themes and post them up for the Drupal community to use free of charge.  You can  also browse many of these themes at http://themegarden.org.  Note:  make sure to pick a theme that works with your version of Drupal.  For instance, you cannot use a Drupal 5 theme with Drupal 6.

For this example, we've navigated to http://drupal.org/project/Themes and picked "Alek 2.0".  Simply find the theme you want, and download the file to your desktop, or any place on your computer where you'll be able to find it.

Once you've downloaded the file, you'll need to upload it to your server.  It needs to go in your "Themes" directory.  You can upload this using cPanel's file manager, or any FTP client of your choice.

Next, you'll need to extract the theme file, in this case, alek_2_0-6.x-1.x-dev.tar.  Using cPanel, simply click the file once, then click the "extract" button in the upper toolbar.

This will leave you with a folder, alek_2_0 in your themes directory:

Now we can enable this theme for our site.  In your drupal site, navigate to Administer -> Themes.  This will bring you to the following screen:

Check the "Enabled" checkbox, and check the "Default" radio button, then click "Save Configuration".  Now you'll see the new theme applied to your site.  Different themes place "blocks", like navigation, in different places of your site.  Many of these positioning elements are easily adjustable via Administer -> Blocks.

The block administration screen essentially allows you to pick what pieces of your site go where.  Most themes will highlight avaiable "regions" in yellow.  You can move any of the available blocks to whatever region you want and click "Save Blocks" to see how the layout looks.