Drupal Theming Fundamentals

Last Friday I gave a repeat presentation of my talk on Theming Fundamentals, first delivered at the 2008 Toronto DrupalCamp. Because it was intended for an audience with a disparate technical knowledge, I tried to keep it more focussed on the general principles than the technical details.

The major points covered included:

• Building your design on the principles of Layout, Usability, Search Engine Optimization, and Technical considerations, always considering the target audience for your web site
• The use of Cascading Style Sheets and some relevant techniques
• Drupal themes, as a way to change the overall look and feel of your web site
• The Zen theme, and a couple of different ways to build a subtheme
• Where to specify style declarations for some common elements
• How to alter the standard structures for pages, blocks, and so on, including how to make the new structure only used in a specific context
• Using function overrides to alter how individual elements are built by Drupal
• Useful tools for theming
• An example process

For anyone interested, a copy of the slides is attached.