December Tampa Bay Meetup (#4)

Sorry for the delayed meeting recap.

Summary

We had a great meeting though. The Tampa group seems to be growing every meeting, it's great to see so many new faces and folks interested in Drupal!

This month we had the following attendees: Robert, DeVaunte, Danielle, Willow, Joe, Harry, Scott, Harvey, Cynde, Pamela, Manuel, Trudy, Travis, Adam, Shawn, Mike and myself (Chris).

Notes

This month Adam went over the basics of theming Drupal. He reccomends starting from a foundation theme, as it will simplify your work and increase the accessibility of your theme as a lot of effort has been put into these themes.
So find a well documented starter theme to start your theme from
something like Zen, Fusion, Blueprint, or Genesis. Genesis is Adam'spreferred starting theme.

Themes are typically installed in the /sites/all/themes/ directory. So if Genesis was installed it would live here after being installed: /sites/all/themes/genesis/. In order to keep your installed foundation theme updatable and a good reference point, you won't want to modify any of it's core files. That's why these themes typically have some method of providing a jumping off point. Each theme has its own methodology for sub-theming, but most foundation themes include a sub-directory that you can use to start your own theme. For Zen, its /sites/all/themes/zen/STARTERKIT, for Gensis its /sites/all/themes/genesis/genesis_SUBTHEME. You'll copy this starting point and paste it in either the foundation themes folder, or the primary themes folder (i.e. /sites/all/themes/genesis/YOURTHEME or /sites/all/themes/YOURTHEME).

Within your new theme there will be many files. The primary theme file, the one that allows Drupal to show the theme on the admin themes page, is the YOURTHEME.info file. This contains all the meta data about the theme, what the name is, what version it supports, if it relies on another theme as the base theme, etc. It also allows you to define as many regions for your theme as you'd like, and to include additional script and css files.

He went over the basics of modifying template files within a theme, these are also files that live within your theme. Files like node.tpl.php, page.tpl.php, block.tpl.php, etc. These are all references to template files that Drupal uses natively, but they allow the active theme to overwrite what will be displayed, and how. So there are a number of templates within Drupal that can be overwritten, including creating template files for specific pages within your site, views, cck fields, and custom modules (provided they are setup with theme hooks and templates).

There was some discussion regarding overriding functions within modules, and if a module has theme_hook functions built-in then the function will be capable of being overwritten in the theme's template.php folder. There was also some confusion over what specifically could be overwritten, any function within a module, or only theme_hook functions. Would be nice to look this up and clarify for those interested.

Once you have some themes installed on the system you can enable/disable themes in the admin interface of your site. It's under the "Site building" section of the admin, or at a similar URL to: http://yourwebsite/admin/build/themes. Here you can see all available themes, set the default theme, and choose which themes are available. In addition you can configure custom settings for each theme, or make global changes for all themes for things like the favicon, what core features to display (logo, tagline, primary navigation, etc.).

It was pointed out that you can select a different theme for the admin section vs the front-end of the site. This can be set here: http://yourwebsite/admin/settings/admin. There was discussion about the fact that if you're building your own theme, you may mess something up in the development process, and accidentally lose access to the admin section/options due to the theme being broken. So doing this before you begin developing your new theme is a good habit.

Adam also discussed GPanels, as a nice module that further extends the Genesis themes usefulness. It will allow you to add panels to effectively further subdivide the provided columns in the theme to allow as much alteration as you'd like.

Mentioned http://design.acquia.com/ as a place to get some good Drupal themes.

Best book for theming was called out as: Front End Drupal, Amazon link. Also mentioned a site by one of the authors of this book: http://www.designtotheme.com/, good e-books, and tips/tutorials.

Future

We're also getting towards the end of our planned meeting topics, so the following ideas were thrown out as potential presentation topics:

• Drupal 7
• SEO in Drupal

That's all I've got from notes and memory. Feel free to add anything else to the thread, and look forward to the next meeting!

-Chris