documentation

The first place to go for anything is the Drupal Handbooks section. Theming is no exception:

The Drupal Handbook: Customization and Theming

Go to the Customization and Theming section of the handbooks for the best basic overview of Drupal theming, and to obtain a great deal of helpful information.

The concept of theming in Drupal very much follows the MVC design pattern. See Wikipedia article on Model-View-Controller pattern. Basically it says that the way stuff looks doesn't need to be connected to what it does. So you can take some functionality that you want to use, and you can make it look the way you want it to look. Drupal does a pretty good job of this in terms of following through in separating the display logic from data processing and business logic, so to speak.

Just thought I'd post a bunch of Drupal related links that may be helpful to the Dojo. As there may be similar lists already started - we may want to reorganize, revise and/or consolidate. It's a wiki, so feel free to have at it.

Contribution Module Rock Star Roundup! CCK, views, panels... oh my!

Today we will be seeing what we can do, creating rich content layouts with modules such as CCK, views, panels, and how to make use of some of the core modules, such as taxonomy. And as we shall see, you can use views within panels...

Comment: It would be helpful to have an abstract of what will be accomplished, or even a demo of the end results for those who get scared browsing half way down and seeing all that code.

First step is to install the relevant modules.

Obviously if you are reading this then you are serious about Drupal and willing to put forth the effort to become a Drupal Ninja (expert). By any means there are a few ideas/ concepts that will make your learning experience and life as a Drupal Dojo much easier and meaningful.

[see attached file pastebin.txt, with all the coded versions of dojo.module]

NodeAPI Sunday!

Well, this is "the day after the night before" of Drupal's 6th birthday marking the release of Drupal 5.0 stable release, so... in honor of this the first thing to do is to update your sandbox development lesson playground sites to Drupal 5.0! (Just follow the all-new instructions in UPGRADE.txt).

Where we were at the end of Lesson #1

Plan

• Sound Check: make sure everyone can get on Skype and is in IRC
• Debrief: talk about how we've been doing, also about moving the regular lesson time to Sunday and/or starting other times
• Drupal Coding Standards: what they are; why they matter
• Keeping Your Code Clean: where to put stuff; how not to kludge
• Keeping Your Code Safe: how and why to use Drupal functions for text, links, input fields and database queries
• Making Your Code Intelligible: the tao of commenting
• Dojo Challenge!: review a patch for Drupal 5.0

Request to the Author!!
Please describe system requirements for this lesson.
What versions of PHP and Drupal are needed to accomplish given task?
I tryed it on Drupal 6.16.
form output does not work!

Complete Class Notes of First Lesson: read on, but also, type on, and execute on, till the end!

[Note: all code examples tested and run as advertised on my own test installation. Everyone should do exactly the same, so we are all on the same page, and can at some point even feel right at home doing patch reviews!!!]

An hour and a half screencap of the 1st lesson is also available (warning 90mb download). NOTE: link currently offline - will update this page when I find a good copy. Full transcript below the jump.