More great video keeps emerging, this time from the fabulous folks at Four Kitchens, who helped organize the wonderful Drupalcamp in Austin last November. My colleague Matt Cheney and I were lucky enough to attend and present. I gave my talk on "Drupal in the Cloud", and the cameras were rolling...
I had a great time in Portland hanging out with the community at DrupalCamp PDX. Personal highlights for me included winning the race to loan Sam Boyer my laptop development environment for his Panels/Page Manager presentation, getting stuck for more than half of the lunch hour answering questions about PANTHEON and EC2 after my talk, and getting to meet mikey_p, heyrocker and other IRC personalities I've known and loved in person.
Matt Cheney delivered a presentation showcasing the power of the CCK module at Drupal Camp Austin.
I love theming Drupal sites. Yes, I realize that means I’m a super nerd. Drupal’s theme layer with its system of overrides is powerful. It works so well that I rarely need a starter theme, like Zen, Basic, Framework or NineSixty nowadays, other than as a reference and source of code snippets.
Drupal 6 saw a jump in the number of contributed starter themes on drupal.org. Now it’s much easier to find a list of all starter themes and there are a few great reviews and a comparison chart. Starter themes are a class of themes that attempt to generalize their features to speed up implementing a design for most any site, while encouraging best practices. They are popular among development teams since they help standardize theming when multiple people must touch the theme. They are also excellent demos of the power and potential of Drupal’s theme system, which makes them a great learning tool and source of documentation. Many starter themes are intended to be used as a base theme, where you create a sub-theme that draws off their files. This makes it easier to produce themes with fewer files and overrides, leaving the base/starter theme to do most of the heavy lifting.
A closer review of contributed starter themes reveals some recurring features, including:
We at Chapter Three are very privileged to have Josh Koenig as one of our founders. His years of experience within the Drupal Community, whether through contributions to Drupal modules and core patches, or in the development of high-performance solutions for Drupal websites, has played a major part in making our company one of the Drupal World’s cutting edge firms.
With the release of Drupal 7, there are undoubtedly many in the Drupal Community looking for guidance around converting a Theme from a Drupal 6 site. At DrupalCon Chicago, two members of our team are presenting you with the knowledge to ease the transition from Drupal 6 to 7 and make your new Drupal 7 site look amazing.
This weekend the San Francisco Bay Area Drupal community will host the fourth Annual Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADCamp).
In the Driesnote here at DrupalCon CopenHagen there was much speculation as to where Drupal may be in 10 years. I really hope that 10 years from now we'll be able to look back at Dries' slides and giggle at our projections, but a part of me fears that if this community doesn't change our ways, that won't be the case.
