Drupal for Designers

Drupal Camps are a great resource for people looking to ramp up their Drupal skills. Session tracks range from beginner to expert and spending a day or two at a camp offers an opportunity to exchange experiences with other developers and themers. I've been spending the weekend at Drupal Camp New Jersey. Today I gave a session called "10 Steps Not To Forget After Installing Drupal". My session followed a keynote given by one of the pioneers of programming, Brian Kernighan. Mr. Kerrighan is one of the creators of AWK and coined the term UNIX. He teaches a course at Princeton which focuses on the practice of programming. It was a tough act to follow.

Yesterday I taught a class titled "Drupal for Designers". The goal of the class is to give designers an introduction designing and theming with Drupal and hopefully encourage them to work more with the platform. The class works with the assumption that the participating designers have limited experience with Web Development. With that in mind I present two approaches to laying out a Web site. The first approach leverages starter themes like AdaptiveTheme and modules like Panels so that most of the work does not involve editing files. The second approach assumes more experience with HTML and CSS with the designer creating and editing their themes template files. With either approach I highly suggest using a starter theme likeZurb Foundation.

I'm not going to go into more detail here but feel free to download the outline. I also recommend an O'Reilly book with the same title, Drupal for Designers by Dani Nordin.