June was a great month, and I finally got around to giving my take on it. Yes, sorry I know it's late :). It was great meeting and hanging out with everyone in the Design 4 Drupal community. You guys rock! I hope to see you again very soon.

Lullabot Training Workshop - June 8-12th

I was lucky enough to spend the week with the Lullabots at one of their recent training workshops in Providence with my sister Amanda. I really enjoyed it. My goal was to learn more about module development and the inner-workings of Drupal and I learned quite a bit.

The training was mainly led by Jeff Eaton and Nate Haug. They are naturals. Their love of Drupal and sharing it with others really came through in their teaching style. We also got a great security primer by Matt Westgate, which was one of the highlights for me. I had quite a few ah-ha moments and what I learned will make me a better themer.

I highly recommend the module development workshop to themers looking to understand more about Drupal. It's also helpful for those looking to help clean up some of the theme-related issues with modules out there, even if you aren't planning on developing any modules.

Thank you Lullabots, I ♥ you.

Design 4 Drupal Boston - June 13-14th

The Design 4 Drupal event at MIT in Boston was a huge success. The schedule was packed with 2 days straight of sessions geared toward theming and design for Drupal. There was no shortage of topics to discuss or speakers willing to share their knowledge. I was so glad to be a part of it. Thank you so much Susan MacPhee and all the awesome volunteers! You did a fantastic job.

The event kicked off with some words from our humble King of Denmark, Morten. Then Jeff Robbins gave a really funny and appropriate keynote: "Why Drupal is like Drupal is."

Introducting Skinr!

I was happy to be able to do a session on Skinr with Chris Bryant. Skinr is a new module for themers we've been cooking up, and we think it's awesome. We released it a couple of days prior to the event. I'm really excited about all the positive feedback it's been getting and hope to have some better documentation available on it soon.

Huge thanks to our team at Gravitek Labs for working with me on Skinr, Balarama Bosch especially.

NineSixty & 960.gs

Nathan Smith, the author of the 960 Grid System and Todd Nienkerk of Four Kitchens gave a great presentation on 960 and Drupal. Todd and Joon Park have been doing some really amazing work on NineSixty, which is a Drupal theme that uses the 960 Grid System framework, with a load of Drupal goodies.

I haven't been much of a CSS grid person to date, but this session has me convinced that I need to try it. Thanks to a great presentation, I know when to try it, and when not to bother. If you weren't able to attend, I highly recommend checking out out the presentation slides.

Studio Base Theme

I've been using the Studio method and loving it since it was released, so I was very happy to share part of my session with Al Steffen and Matt Tucker and to see their session come together last minute. There are a few things I really love about it, including:

• Preprocess functions are broken up into include files per hook, i.e. preprocess-node.inc, preprocess-block.inc
• Functions are separated by type, custom or override and stored in separate include files.
• Attributes are run through a render_attributes() function, which allows you to manipulate attributes during preprocess and results in super-clean template files:

<div<?php print $attributes; ?>>
  <?php if ($title): ?>
  <h3><?php print $title; ?></h3>
  <?php endif;?>
  <?php print $content; ?>
</div>

They have done some great work with this theme, so it's great to see some buzz over it. I'm also really happy to see some of their work become part of Drupal 7.

Rock on Studio!

Mothership - the end to all bloated html! +

I missed this session, but know that it was my sister's favorite. She's fairly new to Drupal, and definitely not alone in loving Morten's approach. Mothership is a great theme for all you markup marines. It's no secret that Morten takes the lead on this concept, and he's been at it for quite a while, so if this type of theming is your preference, definitely check it out because you'll probably learn a thing or two.

Community Efforts

If you haven't already noticed, the Drupal community is awesome. There is so much to say on this topic, and I can't possibly get into it all, but there are a few things that I have to mention.

The Agaric Design Collective team participated in full-force, doing quite a few sessions including: RDFa, Views 2 Theming, Sustainable theming with Zen, and Intro to Version Control. Kathleen Murtagh is working on an exciting project called Simple Committer to help themers overcome the CVS hurdle!

I also had the honor of participating on a panel called Drupal Approaches with Nate Haug, Christopher Calicott, Steven Merrill and Chris Bryant.

I missed How we can make Drupal Better by Matt Farina (a.k.a awesome themer-friendly Drupal developer). Matt has been doing some awesome work in the Drupal community. He's a huge asset to the design community, and now to Palantir. :o) I'm happy to see this discussion going on: Proposal for design.drupal.org. Tutorials and snippets have been an area that I've been interested in improving since I started using Drupal so I was happy to share my thoughts on the subject.

Unfortunately, I also missed Jay Batson's keynote. In one of his recent posts, Drupal Design tipping point? he said:

"What was most exciting for me is that it felt like the design community within Drupal started to gain a collective voice."

I agree, and I'm so excited about it. I think that people like Jay and Matt who take the time to listen and highlight the efforts of the design community are only going to make that collective voice grow louder, which is what Drupal needs.

There's a lot more:

• Blog Posts from Boston D4D Attendees
• More Good Stuff coming out of Drupal Design Camp Boston
• All sessions

Special thanks to Angie Byron for listening and encouraging me to do a session. She has gone out of her way to make this Drupal chick feel comfortable enough to speak up.

Angie, you are awesome! Thank you for all you do.

DrupalCamp Colorado - June 27-28th

I didn't have the pleasure of attending this event, but I was happy to see more intermediate/advanced theming conversations continue. Here are some highlights:

The Top Notch Themes crew did a session on Panels and Skinr being the future of Drupal theming. They also highlighted some of the awesome work they are doing in their themes. Mark Jarrell was kind enough to record the audio for the session, so you can listen here.

Al Steffen and Matt Tucker did a session on Studio. Matt Tucker did another on Preprocess Functions, and there was more from PingVision.

Another exciting session was Drupal Security For Coders and Themers by Ben Jeavons, Ezra Gildesgame and Greg Knaddison. I think themers are usually left out of the security conversations, so it was really nice to see some basic education in this area targeted to themers too. Kudos to you guys!