Custom themes for individual scholar sites can be added to installations of the project software. 'Themes' consistent of CSS and any custom images, much as one would at the famous CSS Zen Garden site.

You do not have access to the markup itself - only the presentation layer. In this way we can provide an elegant and scalable application for all.

Your custom theme will be a sub-theme of the 'scholar base' theme which will also always load. Your CSS will override the CSS of the base theme where you want it to. You can create clean and compact CSS by choosing to keep whichever defaults from the scholar base theme you want. We therefore recommend becoming familiar with the markup we provide and with the default CSS. This can be done in the usual ways (we recommend using Firefox and the Firebug extension) but here we also provide some general background.

The base theme uses a markup structure that was featured back in a 2006 issue of the online magazine A List Apart. We recommend you familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of the 'Holy Grail' layout.

Beyond your custom CSS and images you'll also need a customized '.info' file. The .info file (example: 'mytheme.info') resides with your CSS in your theme folder. It is a proprietary Drupal file which instructs the system where to find your theme's name, CSS file, whether there are theme 'flavor' variants, and whether you prefer to have certain widgets custom enabled.