My WebVisions Session: Theming Drupal
May/102
Here are some resources related to my session tomorrow at WebVisions on Drupal theming.
- Drupal Theming: Crash Course (powerpoint slides)
- Adventures theme - (.zip)
Adventures is a theme for a mock website we go through building in the Drupal course I teach at Ai. I’ve tried to keep it real simple and use just the basic files needed, although I do break out the _header & _footer into include files, as well as a _settings.php file I use to handle some variable setting and logic.
Adventures is not meant to be a generic-type theme, the CSS & images are customized. But the php files are useful to start from. You would probably want to totally change the homepage (page-front.tpl.php) and toss out much of the CSS – but it’s there in case you want to see what I did.
Zen theme is probably the most popular way to start a Drupal custom theme, and one of my students (thanks Ky) alerted me to this handy module to make it even easier: http://drupalmodules.com/module/zenophile
For other simple themes to modify, you might try Basic , or Clean, or SimpleWeb
See you at WebVisions!
Speaking at WebVisions about Drupal
Jan/100
I’ve been doing so much Drupal over the past few years, I think I’m becoming an advocate. I recently proposed to teach a session at the upcoming WebVisions conference on theming Drupal. I think people may have the impression that Drupal sites always have a certain look, but they certainly don’t need to. Often times a designer is left out of the picture when someone creates a Drupal site. I think a lot of people make a Drupal site as a kind of do-it-yourself project, and they just grab one of the 4 core themes. But the design tools are definitely there, a little time learning the theming system can really pay – especially if you already have a good handle on CSS.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to showing what can be done!
Just how popular is PHP?
Jan/100
Getting ready to start a new quarter at the Art Institute, and teaching an introductory course on PHP (www.php.net). It got me thinking… just how popular and widely used is PHP? And, is that looking to change? Is there something else on the horizon that might threaten to topple PHP’s place as (probably) the most popular of all the web development languages?
According to Builtwith.com – PHP leads the pack ahead of ASP.net, Java and other technologies. You can see some interesting pie graphs here:
http://trends.builtwith.com/framework/PHP
I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t even realize Facebook is built using PHP (sheesh, and I call myself an expert). I stumbled on this fact sheet page while looking around today:
Facebook is the second most-trafficked PHP site in the world, and one of the largest MySQL installations anywhere, running thousands of databases. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that allows the company to seamlessly…
http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?factsheet
Uh, the second most trafficked PHP site? There’s only 3 sites ahead of Facebook in website traffic overall (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo), so which of those is built with PHP? Microsoft! Just kidding.. it’s Yahoo. In 2002, Yahoo rebuilt their sites to run on PHP.
http://wheel.troxo.com/2008/01/08/most-popular-websites-running-on-php/
Flickr, Wikipedia, Digg and others are on the list. But that’s a bit of an old list, and it doesn’t include some interesting new developments with my favorite PHP framework – Drupal.
Drupal’s gaining traction pretty well, note the following sites that have recently made the jump to this PHP driven and open-source CMS (Content Management System): The Whitehouse, Lucas Arts, Slate, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Duke University, Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Symentec, Nokia, Sony Erickson and a whole bunch more… http://drupal.org/node/671566
Not to mention the bazillion blogs / sites built with Wordpress – which in turn is built with PHP. So all-in-all, I would say PHP is still doing pretty darn well. Which just goes to show that it’s hard to beat the open-source train once it starts to gain momentum.
