Are you a designer or coder looking to learn more about how to work with Drupal? Come to this set of free workshops in Toronto for step-by-step, in-depth instruction on making your Drupal 6 site unique, eye catching and highly functional.
This event will take place on Saturday, November 22nd at the Centre for Social Innovation, 215 Spadina Avenue in Toronto, from 10am until 3pm (but you can just drop by for the sessions you want to see)
Morning: The Basics
The morning session, from 10:15 until 12:30, will cover the basics of themeing Drupal 6 sites - you can see an outline of the sesssion here.
Afternoon: Open Sessions
In the afternoon we are opening up the floor to the Drupal community, to hold short sessions exploring more specific themeing topics. From 1:30 to 3pm in two 45 minute sessions.
Frequently Asked Questions (and Answers)
This is the first time we have held these workshops, so really, they are infrequently asked questions at this point. But here are the answers anyway.
Currently Scheduled:
MORNING
Designing for Drupal
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.
AFTERNOON
Interested in a specific themeing topic? Don't be shy - volunteer to lead a session on whatever interests you. You don't have to be an expert on the topic - you can lead a discussion and let other people do most of the talking. Of course, if you have a Drupal presentation you have been polishing in front of the mirror for weeks, we can accomodate that, too. Suggest a session here (you need to be registered first!).
The open sessions will be 45 minutes, and run in two sessions from 1:30 pm to 3pm, with three sessions running concurrently.
Presenters so far:
James Walker, Lullabot
http://www.walkah.net
James will be presenting on either "Theme Developer" or "Template preprocessors: the what, when and why" or potentially both.
Qasim Virjee, Design Guru
http://www.designguru.org
"User Interfacing to promote Social Activity Online, in Drupal"
This talk will look at various common activities administrators, anonymous users and authenticated users engage in with a particular website. These common actions and their shared space will be contextualized within the perspective of promoting healthy social activity and a general emotive attachment to space.
From there, we will look at Drupal's stock options for allowing authenticated users to construct and develop an online identity, and then review modern approaches to profile infrastructure development. Taking both Drupal 5.x and 6.x into consideration, this talk will review the Node Profile and Content Profile modules to ultimately relate the ease of implementing tracker/activity-based dynamic user identities.
The talk will aim to close with a brief section on theming as a means of developing furtive spaces for online social interaction and look back on the covered technical approaches to building 'profiles' such that they accurately relate the human user's persona.