Offer to present an introductory theming tutorial at the NYC Drupal Meetup

Events happening in the community are now at Drupal community events on www.drupal.org.
mcaudy's picture
Posted by mcaudy on October 27, 2007 at 1:18am

Hi Everyone,

Adam has indicated previously that he would like to do a theming tutorial at a meetup. There also has been some talk on the new Drupal NYC IRC channel about theming.

I took the 2 day Lullabot Drupal theming workshop last July, and could give an introductory overview of theming. Obviously, it would only be a basic overview - say 20-30 minutes - but it shoud be helpful to newbies, or to Drupal designers/admins who would like to start learning simple coding for Drupal. This could be complemented by a discussion of Drupal theming from the HTML/CSS side from someone with more of a Drupal design/CSS background. (More...)

I think I can present a good introductory session on theming from the coding side. This would involve mostly copying code from previously written themes and understanding what the various PHP variables mean, and how the theming components work together in the Drupal web framework, so that you can create your own custom themes. You can also do a lot with theming, just by copying the HTML and CSS of a web site you want to base your theme on, and adding some simple PHP code and related text in the theme template files. This does not require a lot of real PHP coding, so I think that it would be very useful for beginner / intermediate Drupal themers.

It seems clear from the previous meetings that there are a number of people who are very interested in Drupal, and even using it, but who don't know much about coding yet. Starting with theming is probably the best way to get started with practical coding with Drupal.

Mike Caudy

Categories:

Comments

great idea

Posted by sirkitree on October 27, 2007 at 3:36am
sirkitree's picture

sounds like a plan, can we get some volunteers to help man the questions after the presentation?

/me raises hand.

+1 for helping

Posted by thinkinkless on October 27, 2007 at 1:17pm
thinkinkless's picture

i'm in to help with questions and individual projects after the presentation

Thanks for offering to help. How to plan the time?

Posted by mcaudy on October 28, 2007 at 10:05pm
mcaudy's picture

Hi Suzi (and everyone),

Thanks for offering to help. How should we divide up the time? I could plan a 30 minute presentation on intro theming, from a coding point of view. If the total theming session lasts, say an hour total (it could go longer, I suppose), and I get about 15 minutes worth of questions, that would leave about 15 minutes for you to handle questions and discuss individual projects.

Maybe we should ask Adam if he is planning to have - or knows of any other - presentations to be given for this particular meetup (presumably Nov 27?). Or, maybe we should plan to take up the full two hours, since theming is such a large topic. What do you think about this?

Does anybody else have any suggestions / preferences?

Mike

Chat with Adam about planning the theming session

Posted by mcaudy on October 28, 2007 at 10:27pm
mcaudy's picture

mcaudy: Adam, do you want to have additional presentations at this same meetup, so that we should limit the theming session to one hour total
[6:17pm] mcaudy: or, could we extend it for the full two hours, if people are interested.
[6:17pm] asaunders: We don't want to overwhelm people.
[6:18pm] asaunders: an hour of theming should be fine.
[6:18pm] mcaudy: I don't plan to present more than a 30 minute session, but there could be lots of questions, and Suzis project discussion could go on for a long time by itself
[6:18pm] asaunders: Sounds good.
[6:20pm] asaunders: We'll figure it out at this (next) meetup.
[6:22pm] mcaudy: OK, that sounds good. I will copy this chat to the blog, so that others can see what we have discussed.