Theme Packets: A Modular Approach to Theming Drupal

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Best Practices
maintainability
organization
performance
sanity
theming
Advanced
BoF (Birds of a Feather)
Code & Development
Intermediate

Logistics

Day:

Sunday

Time:

2:30p

Room:

EH 1150

Duration:

One hour

While Drupal modules get to enjoy best practices, make use of coding standards, and share a pretty consistent coding style – the theme layer is a goddamn nightmare. However, you can actually achieve a much nicer development experience with Theme Packets!

Theme Packets are essentially isolated collections of light-weight files that contain theme functions, templates, preprocessors, and all their associated stylesheets and scripts.

That is to say, it is a methodology of organization that enables you to maintain your sanity and prevent your themes from taking up too much of your own psychic RAM.

Oh, and it’s also a module. (disclaimer: I am the maintainer)

This BOF is primarily targeted for advanced themers/developers that identify a problem in the clutter of files that is their theme, as well as css/html/js ninjas who are new to Drupal or PHP and would like to just “do their thang” without having to deal with writing PHP code.

Comments

Skinr?

Submitted by stephthegeek on Mon, 2010-08-02 13:26.

This sounds almost the same as http://drupal.org/project/skinr

Maybe.

Submitted by Helior Colorado on Mon, 2010-08-02 18:52.

That’s interesting. I never used Skinr so I’m not exactly sure where these two ideas overlap (I’ll definitely be checking out your presentation, though. ;) However, the idea of theme packets is more like a discipline and method of development and organization which lets you make sense of advanced themes with a large amount of customizations. The accompanying module isn’t necessarily meant to add features, but rather it’s a tool that automates the process of producing maintainable code.