Angie Byron: The Drupal Community: Where we're going and how to get involved -
Here is a copy of my slides + video from my talk at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit on the Drupal community, how to get involved, and where we're going.
Many of you are probably familiar with the book Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting.
One of the book's authors has just released a new Ebook for the first time themer. Emma Jane Hogbin has written a succinct Creative Commons book that is adapted from her big Front End book, but which goes into more detail about how to get started in theming. This book is a very good introduction, leading the novice themer down a gentle path of gettting a working theme while starting with a mockup in Photoshop, GIMP, or some other design tool.
The ebook covers theming concepts, building regions, using template variables, style sheets, and much more. Although there are many different sets of documentation on theming Drupal, I don't think I have seen another document that explains so many topics on theming in such a clear manner (and in so few words). The book is 29 pages of dense, yet easy-to-understand text. If you follow through the book, you will end up creating a basic theme, and more importantly you will have a pretty thorough understanding of what all those mysterious files actually do, and how you can use them to build more powerful and exotic themes yourself.
This is a good overview of doing some of the initial simple tasks in Drupal 5.
We haven't seen this yet - but I've bought a copy and it is downloading -- since it's from the Lullabots, I'm pretty sure it's going to be good. More after I get a chance to look at it.
Okay - Got a chance to look at it - it's really pretty neat. Not deep in detail, but exactly the sort of thing you'd want to show to someone to introduce them to Drupal in a gentle and entertaining way.