Video by Variant Studios

For many of us, the first time we get our feet wet with Drupal code is in the theme layer. The familiar faces of HTML and CSS welcome us to an otherwise new and foreign landscape. After hacking through some of the tpl files, and maybe pasting some Googled code snippets into our template.php we need some fundamental understanding to get us along. How do we control these regions we're given? Where do these CSS properties come from? And what if we want to start from scratch? Where to begin?

This session is for newcomers to Drupal theming, or even newcomers to CMS websites. For those of you (like me) who have historically been markup control freaks, and you haven't been scared back to Wordpress yet, this session is for you. We'll cover:

*What is a theme, how themes are important, and the purpose of themes
*The fundamental building blocks of a Drupal theme, and where we can leverage these components
*Tools, modules, and base themes to help us along the way
*How and where to find help

Hopefully we'll have some time at the end for some Stump the Chump-style Q&A. If we run short on time, we can do a BoF later.

Goals: Improve understanding of Drupal theming architecture, tips and hints to get started theming effectively.

Prerequisites: Good understanding of HTML and CSS, elementary understanding of what PHP does, some poking around Drupal, confusion.