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Website template porting to Drupal 6 - a crash course

Gábor Hojtsy's picture
Submitted by Gábor Hojtsy on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 15:14.

Session recording

Attached files

Placement
Session time: 
08/30/2008 - 11:00 - 08/30/2008 - 12:00
Conference booklet summary and bio
Article for conference booklet: 
Web design is hard. I am not at all a designer or graphic magician, but would like to see great themes on my Drupal sites, so I am continuously on the lookout for great templates to adapt to Drupal. Whoever professional you ask will tell you that building a website on an existing template is a bad idea and of course you should architect the look and feel and interaction of the website for the specific need at hand. Unfortunately lots of people just lack the professional resources. And starting from an existing template still allows you to tweak it further (if the license grants you to do so). Therefore this session is about picking a template (the Modern World template from Solucija: http://www.solucija.com/templates/demo/Modern_World/) and converting it to a fully functional Drupal 6 theme with blocks, menus, a screenshot for the theme selector and all live from the ground up in 45 minutes, instructions included. Make sure to drink some coffee so you can grok every part of this quick flowing live tutorial!
Bios for conference booklet: 
Gábor Hojtsy is a "code gardener" at Acquia. Acquia provides commercial support for the Drupal social publishing system. Acquia offers supported distributions, network services and technical support to help organizations build, deploy and manage Drupal websites.

Overview

Web design is hard. I am not at all a designer or graphic magician, but would like to see great themes on my Drupal sites, so I am continuously on the lookout for great templates to adapt to Drupal. Whoever professional you ask will tell you that building a website on an existing template is a bad idea and of course you should architect the look and feel and interaction of the website for the specific need at hand. Unfortunately lots of people just lack the professional resources. And starting from an existing template still allows you to tweak it further (if the license grants you to do so).

Therefore this session is about picking a template (the Modern World template from Solucija) and converting it to a fully functional Drupal 6 theme with blocks, menus, a screenshot for the theme selector and all live from the ground up in 45 minutes, instructions included. Make sure to drink some coffee so you can grok every part of this quick flowing live tutorial!

Agenda

* Starting from template vs. custom research/process/architecture/design
* Template licensing, what should you consider
* Downloading and starting off with the theme
* Several steps, while the theme will be horribly broken, but we keep going
* A glamourous end result
* More on licensing, how to contribute the theme to drupal.org or elsewhere if drupal.org is not applicable

Goals

Attendees will leave with a recipe to port existing templates to Drupal 6 and hopefully even contributing them to Drupal.org (but this last item will not be obligatory).

Resources

Also check out my blog post: http://hojtsy.hu/blog/2008-jul-22/i-will-teach-you-port-templates-drupal...

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eigentor's picture

Theme my day

Submitted by eigentor on Tue, 07/22/2008 - 18:33.

This sounds like a lot of fun. And very encouraging to people who would also not name themselves a graphic designer, but still wanna ride the bull.

Some people call me a Space Cowboy

Pasqualle's picture

template porting

Submitted by Pasqualle on Sat, 07/26/2008 - 12:39.

similar tutorial:
http://www.drupaltherapy.com/node/52

betz's picture

Nice, will be there!

Submitted by betz on Sat, 08/23/2008 - 09:41.

Nice, will be there!

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

underperformed, find attachment

Submitted by Gábor Hojtsy on Wed, 09/10/2008 - 17:38.

I've underperformed for several reasons on stage at Drupalcon, and did not get to the result I desired to arrive at. Find the attached theme which I was about to arrive in 45 minutes. It is a snapshot of the result from a previous edition of this session from another event. It is not a tailored made or ready theme for Drupal 6 of course, but that was far from the goal of the session.

I hope to make a case study you can read or watch sooner or later to make up for the sloppy presentation. I cannot say any timeframe at this point though.