Subtheming to add a single template?

Question

As a programmer, I know a great deal about Drupals backend functionality, but little about theming. I'm using Corolla as a theme, and I want to add a single Views template to the theme.

Initially, I created a blank subtheme, but some of Corollas settings don't show up on my subtheme's settings page, so apparently this changed functionality.

Now I'm considering simply keeping my template as a local patch to Corolla as that's a way of solving the problem that I understand well.

How would you go about solving this issue?

Answer 1

The theme settings not being inherited by the subtheme is a Drupal core bug. If you simply copy the theme settings from the parent's .info file to the subtheme's .info file, it will alleviate the issue.

However, keeping a local patch of the theme is a reasonable solution in this case. The rule of "dont edit a contrib theme" is really in place just to ease potential updates, etc. for users who may be unaware of the risk of losing their changes upon updating themes/modules.

Answer 2

If the only thing you are changing is one of a module's theme templates, and nothing with respect to the theme itself, I'd just create a subdirectory in the theme named after the module and stuff the template in there. So, in this case it would be .../sites/all/themes/corolla/views/views-____.tpl.php If you start doing this with a lot of modules' templates, you might consider creating a template directory itself and then module-name subdirectories, eg, ...sites/all/themes/corolla/tpl/views but this is just personal neatness preferences now. Either way, the theme system will recurse down through its directory looking for the templates (eg they don't need to be in the theme's root directory cluttering things up)