Drupal Theming Fundamentals

The morning presentation will be an expanded version of a session from this year's Toronto DrupalCamp. The approach we'll outline is based on using the Zen theme, creating a custom subtheme for your site's identity, and will be based on Drupal 6.

The session will run from 10:30am to 12:30pm when we break for lunch.

Topics will include:

• Design Considerations
  Learn about the four main considerations when designing your site, and how they relate to your intended audience.
• A Primer on CSS
  A quick overview of Cascading Style Sheets, enough to start altering the look of your site
• CSS techniques
  Want rounded corners? We'll show you how to make them without any additional markup. Want to break from javascript rollovers, but leery of hover states that lag? We'll show you solutions to these and other theming challenges.
• jQuery for theming
  Drupal themers benefit from access to the powerful and simple jQuery javascript library, which can be a real boon to themers. We'll show you how a little scripting can take your site's theme to a whole new level.
• Making subthemes with Zen
  Bulding an entire site theme entirely from scratch can be a daunting process. We'll show you an easier way, using the Zen theme as a starting point, for cross-browser, table-free layouts.
• Creating context-specific templates
  Many sites have at least one spot that needs a little special treatment. We'll show you how to give these special cases the attention they require.
• Enough PHP to be dangerous
  Sometimes you need to make structural changes to how the page, or some part of it is constructed. Often that means delving into PHP, so for the uninitiated, we cover a few basics to get you started.