Theming in Drupal 7 has always been a bit fiddly at the best of times. Unbeknown to me a small feature crept into a Drupal 7 release without me realising - the backport of theme debug settings from the much anticipated Drupal 8. This feature allows you to view debug information directly in the mark-up and not have to go chasing template suggestion names from within the Drupal admin screens.
In your Drupal 7 installation simply add this line to your settings.php:
$conf['theme_debug'] = TRUE;
Clear your caches and refresh the page and you should see debug information in your mark-up which contains template suggestions:
<!-- THEME DEBUG -->
<!-- CALL: theme('page') -->
<!-- FILE NAME SUGGESTIONS:
* page--front.tpl.php
* page--node.tpl.php
x page.tpl.php
-->
<!-- BEGIN OUTPUT from 'modules/system/page.tpl.php' -->
…
<!-- END OUTPUT from 'modules/system/page.tpl.php' -->
It may only be a small development in the scale of things, but this really does improve my theming workflow with Drupal 7. All I can say is huge thanks to the Drupal Community for implementing this, as it really does make a difference.
References/Further reading
- https://www.lullabot.com/articles/drupal-8-theming-fundamentals-part-2 - The article where I stumbled across this feature. It's also well worth a read if you're in to Drupal 8 theming.
- https://www.drupal.org/node/223440 - Further details on theme_debug.
- https://www.drupal.org/drupal-7.33-release-notes - Drupal 7.33 release notes - where this feature was introduced.