theme

Tired of all of your sites looking like... well, like every other Drupal site? Take a tour of projects that break the mold and learn about the techniques used to build them! We'll cover everything from design to implementation, review some quick tips on building your information architecture to match your design, the tools for the job, and even some advanced techniques used to create visually striking effects.

What questions will your session answer?:
Designing for Drupal vs.

Here we’ll take a look at Views’ powerful templating system and discuss how you can clean up the underlying markup, generate dynamic IDs and classes or even alter the output.

EDIT: Benjamin Doherty (bangpound) and I are now co-presenting and he will discuss his Semantic Views module after.

Hans and I have talked about merging my Semantic Views session into this one. My session would have been very thin if spread out to be 45 minutes, so he wants to expand this to 1 hour and include me.

In this session I’ll present a roadmap to learning Drupal Theming. You won’t learn everything about Drupal theming, but you will learn that you don’t need to know everything in order to start building Drupal themes.

We’ll cover all the major parts of Drupal theming:

• Theming Examples
• Architecture of the Drupal Theme Layer
• .info files
• Stylesheet inheritance
• Template files
• Template variables
• Preprocess functions
• Theme functions

Here we will weigh the Pros and Cons of Using Grid Systems (e.g. 960 or Blueprint) vs. Starter Themes (e.g. Zen, Mothership) vs. Full Custom (e.g., roll your own). What benefits do each offer and when are they most appropriate?

Learn from how to ease Drupal theming frustration with Zen 6.x-2.0 from me (JohnAlbin), the maintainer of the Zen project and a top contributor to Drupal 7.

• Zen organization — sub-themes, stylesheets, what to use and what to delete
• Layout — building complex layouts with Zen Columns or grids
• z-index — you need more hammers
• IA — building navigation
• Accessibility — open access can be easy
• Q&A — ask me anything (Drupal-related, please)

Surprisingly, this will be the first presentation I’ve given about Zen in over 2 years!

Slides/Notes: 

jQuery_for_Themers_Designers.pdf

Small non-intrusive animations and interactions can greatly enhance the user experience and impress website visitors and clients. jQuery and jQuery UI make it easy to add these enhancements with very little knowledge of javascript or programming. Learn how!

No understanding of jQuery, javascript or even Drupal theming is required, but a good understanding of CSS selectors (e.g.

Views is used by a vast number of Drupal sites, but theming Views to match your site’s theme, to break out of a restrictive module’s look, or to stand out as unique content, can be tricky.

Slides/Notes: 

CDMUG-SpringJam-session2-D7Themes.ppt

Learn about building themes in Drupal 7. What is new? How to convert existing themes into compatible 7 code.

There are many ways to theme a Drupal site. Hans and Doug will introduce the four ways of theming a Drupal site. Both will discuss the pros and cons of each and when each approach is most appropriate.

Slides/Notes: 

Basic_D6_Theming.pdf

• Drupal 6 Theming: Come Knowing .css; Leave a Jr. Theme Developer
• Have you ever heard "All Drupal sites look alike? They don't have to. Find out where to begin, how Photoshop can help, and how to integrate with Drupal 6. Come and learn how to make your Drupal site distinct.
• A basic understanding of static .html and .css is required.