How to clone Drupal Bartik Theme

Posted in Tutorials

The Bartik theme is Drupal 7’s default theme.  We want to clone that theme and call it “Example” so that we can make changes to the theme instead of changing Bartik.

1. Because Bartik is a core theme, it is located in “/themes/bartik” folder.  Copy that folder and rename to “/sites/all/themes/example”.  This is where install (non-core theme) goes.  We name the folder “example” because the name of our theme is “Example”.

2. Inside the example folder, rename the bartik.info to example.info to match the theme name.

3. Inside the example.info file, change the name and description line to …

name = Example
description = Clone of Bartik
package = Custom
version = 1.0
core = 7.x

We change version to 1.0 because this is the first version of our theme.  We change package to Custom, because once we customize it, it would no longer be considered a core theme.

4. Inside the template.php file, search “bartik_” and replace with “example_” everywhere in the file.  These are hook functions.  The hook functions must start with the template name.  In our case, there was 9 instances replaced.

5. The image screenshot.png would be where you put the new image of your new theme.

6. After you upload the example theme folder, clear the Drupal cache by “Drupal dashboard -> Configuration -> Performance”.

7. Then go to the “Appearance” menu and “Enable and set default” the Example theme. …

8.  Clear Drupal cache as before.

That should do it.  You can now make whatever changes you want to the template at …

/sites/all/theme/example/

without messing up Bartik.

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