One of the more annoying things about theming Drupal sites is having to wade through the staggering amounts of wrapping <div> elements and containers. Some of these are are fairly easy to get rid of. Others require you to override core templates.

I recently found a clean way to get rid of a couple of those. These two were introduced in Drupal 7, and you will probably find them on almost all Drupal 7 sites – they look like this:

Or in markup:

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<div class="region region-content">
  <div id="block-system-main" class="block block-system">
    <div class="content">
    <!-- Actual page content here -->
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Now, the last of these wrappers are actually useful, the rest stems from one of the changes in Drupal 7, namely that the main page content is now a block, that can be positioned on the page via Drupal’s block system.

Now, that’s a nice concept, but all the site I’ve seen do business as usual, and get around this inconvenience by creating a block region called “content” and sticking the content-block in there as the only thing, leaving the region and block wrappers as more DIV-spam in your site’s markup.

So unless you’re actually doing something different with the content block and/or region, you can just get rid of these extra wrappers by sticking the two following templates in your theme’s template folder:

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<?php
/**
 * @file
 * Render the main content block region.
 *
 * We don't print all kinds of wrapper divs and titles, just the content.
 */
print $content;

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<?php
/**
 * @file
 * Render the main content block.
 *
 * We don't print all kinds of wrapper divs and titles, just the content.
 */
print $content;

Short and sweet :)