The Way Drupal Theming Was

When I started Drupal theming in 2004, it was all a bit overwhelming. Back then, the core theme engine was something called Xtemplate, and it gave the impression to the n00b themer of being a great big mess. When you looked at the page template, it was one big blob of markup and logic, and it was very hard to figure out to change just about anything. What's more, it seemed to be very brittle: change something and you got the white screen of death.

And thus life was for the themer through Drupal 4.5 and the beginnings of 4.6.

New Drupal Theming Power

Then, in 2005, came the PHPTemplate theme engine, thanks to Adrian Rossouw (now with Development Seed), and the heavens opened up.

Suddenly (well, not suddenly, as it took a lot of work) Drupal templating had a structural logic: a nested system that simplified the clutter, gave us defined variables to work with, and provided the basis for extending the system. This was really really cool — so cool that it immediately became the theme engine of choise, and, with Drupal 4.7, it became the theme engine for Drupal core.

I was so excited about it, I did my first Drupal conference presentation on it, at OSCMS 2007 at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale. (It was part of a larger topic of overriding display upon which I collaborated with Greg Knaddison and Ezra Barnett Gildesgame, now of Growing Venture Solutions. The PDF of my slides are available here, though they're pretty outdated now.)

Since then the Drupal theming system has evolved and improved. There are a lot of nifty techniques, tricks, best practices that are available to the themer. What's essential is having a good understanding of the underlying architecture, because that's how you can figure out where to look, how to go about making the changes you want to make the theme yours.

No PHP knowledge is required ... beyond knowing not to muck with what's between the <?PHP ... ?> tags. Of course, knowing some PHP can help. But you can also pick up the basics as you go, if you want to delve into the coded bits.

Learning Drupal Theming in 2010

My session proposed for DrupalCon SF on Drupal theming basics brings a comprehensive look at the Drupal theming system and how the front-end developer new to Drupal can take charge of the output by taking advantage of what Drupal gives you.

You won't come out an expert — that would be a ridiculous promise — but you will come out able to start rocking your own themes. You will have a solid understanding how the Drupal theme is structured, how the various templates work together, how to define regions, how to add your own targeted CSS files and scripts, use of subthemes, some good base themes to work from, how to do custom overrides of obscure, quirky or persnickety output using preprocess ... and you'll grok theming in such a way that even if you don't know how to do something, you'll know how to go about figuring it out, where to look, what to change, etc.

And because we're about to enter the age of Drupal 7, this presentation will be about these things for Drupal 7 (with some notes on how things have changed from Drupal 6). So this session could also be of interest to the experienced Drupal themer who hasn't had a chance to delve much into Drupal 7 yet.

Session voting is now open for DrupalCon SF, so if you think this session sounds helpful to you, or would be of use to the several hundred people new to Drupal who are expected to attend, please vote for my session, "Grok Drupal (7) Theming".

Thanks!

Related: 
OSCMS theming presentation: request for input

topics: 

Drupal,
design,
web design,
conferences,
DrupalCon,
DrupalCon San Francisco 2010,
theming.