Advanced Theming Techniques in Drupal

Drupal Camp Colorado 2010 was a blast! The weekend camp (no we didn't stay in tents) was packed full of interesting sessions about Drupal. My colleague Scott Reynen and I presented a session over the weekend titled "I CAN HAZ AWESOME? -- Advanced Theming Techniques". During the question/answer time at the end of our session, one gentleman asked for our slides (best viewed in Safari & Chrome). I quickly pointed out that our slides were not all that helpful (mainly pictures of cute cats to swoon the audience). I let him know we'd be posting links from our session, so here you go sir!

Here is a list of modules we mentioned in our session:

• Semantic Views - An easy way to skip custom node templates and add semantic markup to your views output.
• Semantic CCK - An easy way to skip custom node templates and add semantic markup to your CCK fields for node pages.
• Skinr - Allows one to add common classes to blocks (etc.) in Drupal
• Mothership - Mothership is just one example of a Drupal base theme. Base themes help make creating custom themes more efficient.
• Base CSS - Just like base themes, using some base CSS will help make your theming more efficient. Frameworks like the 960.gs are a good option. You should at least use a reset.css to equalize default browser styling.
• LESS CSS Preprocessor - LESS allows you to use variables and other programming like functionality in your CSS. Check out my blog post about LESS.
• Style Stripper - Style Stripper lets you turn off CSS from modules, including Drupal core.
• css.module - An elegant solution for adding custom CSS to specific nodes. Not a great solution for end-users due to security concerns with CSS.
• @font-your-face - A perfect way to utilize the CSS @font-face property within Drupal. @font-your-face allows you to quickly install and start using fonts from different font providers. Watch this video to be enlightened.
• jQuery Update - Continually disappointed that your favorite jQuery plugins require jQuery 3+? Install jQuery Update and get on with it!
• jQuery Uniform - An awesome jQuery plugin, and now Drupal module allows you to style ugly form fields. Requires jQuery Update.