Beginner Theming

Resources During / After Drupalcon

Session Description

Believe it or not, Drupal makes theming easy! Drupal provides the themer with a system of overrides that allows you to change literally anything on your site. Themers decide what gets printed to the screen and what doesn't - essentially what lives and dies. For this and some other reasons, themers have ultimate control. Don't let it get to your head though. Before you can make Drupal bend to your will, you have to introduce yourself via the .info file. From there, you can control style with the CSS we've all come to love. Want to add in your own divs, regions, classes, etc? That will require copying and tweaking one of Drupal's template files (a super easy process). Following this easy pattern, you can get most of the way there without writing PHP. Even if you need to extend the way that breadcrumbs, pagers or other Drupal elements work via the template.php file, you can usually find a friendly companion on Drupal.org who has code you can copy and use without having to fully understand it. By the end of the class, you'll be able to create your own themes, sub-themes and rock Drupal's world like you never have before - all while fulfilling the mantra of a themer: "Make it pretty." [The techniques you learn in this session will apply to both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7, however I will be leading the session in Drupal 7.] Intended audience: Beginners who want to learn the basics of theming without knowing PHP.

Speakers

Time slot: 
Tuesday 10:45am-11:45am
Track: 
Design and user experience
Experience level: 
Beginner
Questions answered by this session: 
What are some Drupal theming best practices?
What is a sub-theme?
How does theme building and sub-theming make your job easier? (without hacking core or contrib modules and themes)

Comments

I posted some additional information at the top of this page. Please feel free to send follow up questions, comments and feedback to david+dcdenver@chapterthree.com.

Hm okay so apparently Drupal's auto link filter didn't like the +. If you send something to the above address I wont get it, but if you use the following address it should work just fine: david+dcdenver@chapterthree.com

If you missed this and want to check out the video / audio capture of this presentation, go check it out Beginner Theming on the Chapter Three website.

It looks like the Drupalcon Denver folks just uploaded the video at the top of this post! They didn't use the same source as me, so you may find that one works better than the other.

Great presentation, I would still like to have links to slideshows, I am not sure why this was not available to download.

Crap never mind, I missed all the links, bad deviant bad!

One of the best intro to drupal theming presentations I've seen

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