beginners

Unless you're able to travel to the US, it's not often that we Vancouverites get the chance to go to a theming workshop put on by the author of one of the most well loved, and well used Drupal theming books to date.

January 11, 2010, Emma Jane Hogbin, co-author of Front End Drupal, is coming to town and is putting on a one-day workshop for 20 keen beginner themers.

The workshop will be geared towards people who have previous HTML/CSS experience and at least a familiarity with PHP. It will focus on bringing those basic skills and sharpening them with a focus on how to work with the Drupal theming system.

The Workshop

Front End Drupal is focuses on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The focus is to show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes.

DrupalCon is about to descend on Paris in a matter of days. Sadly no, I will not be attending. But you're in luck, because our very own Disseminator of Awesome Shawn is on his way to represent Affinity Bridge and enjoy his first DrupalCon! In my absence, I thought I would write up a little DrupalCon End-User Guide of sorts, for all those first timers out there. Finding the optimal balance of geekery and socializing is key to making the most of the week, so consider these tips to lead you on the path to finding that balance.

Last week Ariane was in on #drupal on irc.freenode.net and heard some of the core developers talking about how badly backlogged the patch review queue is. Apparently there are many good patches that haven't been reviewed and therefore haven't made it into the current release. Each of these little patches helps to make Drupal more robust and with the Drupal 7 code freeze creeping up, this is an area that needs extra help. At Affinity Bridge we have been talking about how to contribute more to Drupal core and this seemed like a good opportunity to get involved. We decided to put some of our time into helping out and realized we could use a little mentoring to get started. Ariane put the word out on Twitter and soon we had a volunteer to help us. Yesterday we were lucky enough to have Karoly Negyesi (aka chx on Drupal.org) come by and teach us about core patch reviews and the Drupal issue queue.