Meetup May 2009 - At McDonalds in Apple Valley

The High Desert Drupal group meets the first Wednesday of every month. This local group is a nice place for people to learn and talk about Drupal, a world popular content management system (CMS). We also talk about web development in general, covering all aspects from planning, design, development, and maintaining a web site. RSVP is not required and attendance is free. Tell all your friends!

What are we going to talk about?

Theming, Theming, and more Theming

Drupal is great for creating fully functional websites without writing any code, but what if you want to customize your site and change the HTML markup that is output on the pages you create? What if you want different HTML markup for each type of content on your site?

Contemplate Module

This month Matthew Krick will talk about how to make your site NOT look like every other Drupal site. He is going to show us several ways to change the markup that is output by Drupal. Matthew will give us a demo of the contemplate module by creating a blog site and theming the content of the site differently depending on who posted the blog post. He is going to show us how to accomplish this right through the Drupal administrative interface. The contemplate module allows you to modify templates fast, without having to deal with the file system or the complexity of the Drupal theme system.

Template Files and template.php

As we have all come to find out, there are many ways to skin a cat. Following Matthew's presentation, Tom Friedhof will give a brief presentation of how to make the same modifications to your theme, but using the Drupal theme system. The process is little more complex, so it won't be as easy as using the contemplate module to modify our HTML. But, with this complexity comes more power. I will touch on what the template.php file is used for in your Drupal theme, how to modify the variables that are available to you in your template files, and how to override the HTML output that modules create.

Where are we meeting?

We are meeting in the McDonalds conference room at the Apple Valley McDonalds on the corner of Apple Valley Rd and Bear Valley Rd. The room seats up to 49 people and is free to use.

If you plan on attending, sign up for an account on this site and then click the "Sign Up" button below to let us know you're coming. You DO NOT have to sign up on this site to attend, you can just show up. If you do sign up, you'll be emailed a reminder for the meeting on one day before the meeting.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any suggestions.