Installing Drupal Themes

Installing new themes in an existing Drupal installation is easy. You simply copy the new theme to the themes folder, and then enable it.

We will be using two of a webmaster's essential tools for this tutorial: a web browser and an FTP client. It really doesn't matter which specific tool you use. In these tutorials, we will use Firefox as our browser, and we will use FileZilla as our FTP client. Feel free to substitute whatever tool works for you.

You will, of course, need a working Drupal installation. You'll also need a theme to install. For this tutorial, we'll be using the LiteJazz theme.

To install a new theme, follow these simple steps:

Extract the contents of the theme to a local folder.
When you download a new theme, it will usually be in the form of a compressed archive... typically a zip or gzip file. Extract the contents of this archive (we use WinRAR for this) to a local folder.
Using your FTP client, copy the new theme folder (we're using LiteJazz in our example) to the themes folder of your Drupal installation. In our FileZilla example, we simply drag the litejazz folder on the left, and drop it into the themes folder on the right.
Once the copy is complete, you should see the new theme's folder on your drupal site along with your other installed themes.
Point your browser to the admin page of your Drupal site, either by clicking the Admin menu item or by using the URL "www.mysite.com/admin". Then select the Themes option under the Site Building section of the menu.
Select the Enable checkbox and the Default radio button next to the newly installed theme, and then click Save Selection.
The new theme is applied to your site. If you have configured Drupal to use the system default theme on administration pages, you will see the change immediately. Otherwise, point your browser to the front page.
And now we see our front page with our new theme.