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Over the weekend, Web Easy Media participated in Indianapolis's first and under-estimated Drupal Camp. It was great to see a collection of Drupal professions, enthusiasts, and newbies all together in one place. The sessions had a good ballance of intros and advanced sessions.

My three sessions included Intro to Drupal Theming, Rapid Theme Development with Subthemes, and Design 4 Drupal. The last being a BOF (Birds of Feather) round-table discussion.

Despite some people turning away because of the packed room, the Intro to Drupal Theming session went rather well. The main focus of the session was to explain my personal process of balancing your approach between the site configuration settings, using modules, creating template files, and then utilizing your CSS files. I explained the structure of the Theming layer of Drupal, the .info file, how to create a subtheme for getting started, and then showed where to go to find templates that you need to edit.

Rapid Theme Development with Subthemes touched on the differences between Zen, Fusion, and Tao. The focus was to explain how some of these differences may alter which base theme you use to develop a site with. The descussion touched on Zen's "content first" approach, Fusion's use of the Skinr module, and the concept of Tao's minimalistic base.

Design 4 Drupal didn't yeild as many local designers as I had hoped, but we did have an excellent discussion about a Designer's role in a drupal project, how designers may not care about which CMS (Content Management System) is being used, and wether they should care if we want them to push the boundaries of what is expected from a drupal site design. There was also some discussion about where a developer's role ends and a themer's role begins.

Below are a number of links and files related to the sessions and discussions in these sessions.