Get your Drupal on at DrupalCon San Francisco

Post-Conference Update: Video of my session is now posted.

Update: The session schedule has been posted!

DrupalCon San Francisco is happening next month at the Moscone Center. This will be the biggest DrupalCon ever. And among all the offerings, I will be presenting on Drupal theming:

So you know your CSS. You have you xhtml down, even are up on HTML5. But Drupal throws so much other stuff at you. What do you do? Where do you start?

This session provides an overview of how themes work in Drupal. The technical architecture may seem complex, but it's actually quite simple once you grasp the concepts and structures.

Topics covered include:

• Core templates and how they work together
• Most-used templates and the variables available
• Overriding templates for common use cases
• The Drupal design patterns you will need to design and theme for (whether you like it or not)
• Changes between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7
• Modules that make theming easier and/or more powerful
• The parent-child theme thing
• Working with module templates, including Views and CCK
• Gotchas, tips and tricks

–From the session description

DrupalCon SF has 3 days of sessions, 2 days of code sprints, all for under $200.

As I posted on my personal blog....

You won't come out an expert — that would be a ridiculous promise — but you will come out able to start rocking your own themes. You will have a solid understanding how the Drupal theme is structured, how the various templates work together, how to define regions, how to add your own targeted CSS files and scripts, use of subthemes, some good base themes to work from, how to do custom overrides of obscure, quirky or persnickety output using preprocess ... and you'll grok theming in such a way that even if you don't know how to do something, you'll know how to go about figuring it out, where to look, what to change, etc.

And because we're about to enter the age of Drupal 7, this presentation will be about these things for Drupal 7 (with some notes on how things have changed from Drupal 6). So this session could also be of interest to the experienced Drupal themer who hasn't had a chance to delve much into Drupal 7 yet.

Mine will be but one of many on Drupal theming. Presentations are for people on all levels.

So what else is DrupalCon about?

Let's see:

• 3 days of over 100 sessions on design, development, theming, administering and managing Drupal
• 2 days of code sprints where you can work side by side with many of Drupal's top developers
• All kinds of ad-hoc birds of a feather gatherings focusing on whatever people have on their minds
• An "unconference on the Sunday before it begins.

If you haven't been to a DrupalCon before, it really is something anyone with any interest in Drupal should check out. #1: It's fun.

The largest previous DrupalCon was in Washington, DC in 2009.

The last DrupalCon was in Paris last September.

In Barcelona in 2007, Dries lays out plans for Drupal 7 in "The State of Drupal," his keynote which he updates every DrupalCon.

By the way, if you're in the Bay Area on that Sunday, the Unconference is free! There are also training sessions available (for extra cost).

We will be there. Hope to see you!