This learning series covered just the tip of the theming iceberg. Hopefully you're now feeling motivated to learn even more about theming. In this lesson we will review some of the other topics you will want to explore next including: advanced theming techniques, using a base theme, such as Omega, layout modules. By the end of this lesson you will by able to identify which videos you should (or could) watch next to learn more about theming Drupal.

To go from design to theme we worked through three major steps: building a style guide; building out Drupal; and finally applying the style guide to Drupal. In this lesson we'll review each of the steps outlined in this learning series:

• creating a style guide with base rules, layout rules, and component rules
• extracting design assets
• configuring Drupal
• creating theme files
• debugging components from within Drupal

By the end of this lesson you will be able to outline the process needed to transform a static design file into a functional Drupal theme.

Once all of the elements are in place, it's time to get down to the real work of theming the components. In this lesson we will:

• use our style guide and checklist to find each component
• check to see if the style looks "right"
• troubleshoot broken styles so that each component looks as good as the designer's original, static files

By the end of this lesson you will be able to identify elements on a rendered Drupal page which do not have the correct styles applied, determine the source of the problem, and alter the markup or styles to correct the output displayed in a browser.

Once your theme is uploaded you still need to enable it before it will be applied to your site. By the end of this lesson you will be able to enable new themes for your Drupal site.

It's always smart to do your development work in a local environment, but eventually you will need to upload your theme your server. In this lesson we'll upload our theme to our web server using Filezilla. By the end of this lesson you will know which folder your theme needs to be uploaded to, and at least one application suitable for uploading files.

Additional resources

Filezilla

The final step before we step back into Drupal is to create a checklist for all the things we need to implement in Drupal. Using our style guide as a starting point, we'll ensure that every design decision which has been made can be implemented in Drupal. Your checklist might also include notes about which modules should be used to build each of the components from within Drupal. Creating a checklist might seem like a trivial task, but it's really important that you know exactly what you're about to build so that you don't get overwhelmed once you step into Drupal. By the end of this lesson you should be able to create a document with all the instructions, and notes you will need to apply your style guide to a Drupal site.

In SMACSS there are both major and minor layout rules that need to be created. The major layout rules are often handled by a grid framework and are used to describe big areas on your site, such as your Drupal regions. The minor rules are used for the components (for example how a picture aligns next to a paragraph of text). In this lesson we'll start by review how Sass allows us to use semantic naming for our CSS layout classes. Then we'll adapt the sample Sass provided by the 960 Compass Plugin so that it uses the necessary structure for our design.

By the end of this lesson, you will be able to implement the layout rules from your style guide as a Sass file using the 960 Compass Plugin as a reference.

Additional resources

960gs

Domicile Theme

In this lesson we will convert the style guide into a series of stubs which we can view in a Web browser. The design was originally created using the templates from the 960gs. We'll use this same grid framework to ensure all of our margins are automatically adopted. Grid frameworks are excellent for rapid prototyping of designs. Ultimately many front end developers choose choose to write their own for the final theme; however, if you're just getting started try to stick with a grid framework to reduce the number of things that you need to fight with.

The original theme that was created for this design used the NineSixty base theme. There are some nifty features in this theme which are great for more complex designs; however, it is not responsive, and does not use Sass. To bring the lessons up-to-date we'll be using the 960-Compass Plugin to generate our stub files and give us some sample Sass output to work with.

By the end of this lesson you will be able to convert a style guide to a series of stub files in Sass (or CSS) using SMACSS conventions and a grid framework.

Additional resources

SMACSS (Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS) 

960gs

960-Compass-Plugin

Intro to Sass and Compass

In the previous lesson you created a text-based style guide. It's now time to extract the necessary assets from our static design for use in our theme. To complete this lesson you will need a design application capable of opening a .psd file. The video demonstrates Photoshop, but I typically use Gimp. Either is fine. And if you don't have a graphics program, you can watch the video, but simply download the assets which were extracted during the lesson. By the end of this lesson you will be able to identify page-level design assets which need to be extracted from a design file for your Drupal theme.

Additional resources

Gimp

Photoshop

Pixelmator

Over the last couple of years we've seen the rise of object oriented CSS. There's been a lot of work done by smart folks to categorize different types of rules that we use to style our sites. We're going to take advantage of this work and use it to create a style guide. This foundation piece will help us to map the elements in our static design to the elements that we will build, and theme, in Drupal.In this lesson we'll create a style guide from our design with:

• Base rules
• Layout rules
• Component rules

By the end of this lesson you will be able to create a text-based style guide of your design which accurately describes your site according to base rules, layout rules, and component rules. You will be able to further supplement this style guide by adding relevant images which reference the exact component the style guide is describing.

In this lesson we're going to learn about the front end development strategy of theming by components. This strategy relies on being able to break a design into individual components. Elsewhere on the Web this technique has been described as “atomic design” or “interface pattern pairing”. No matter what you call it, developing a pattern library of components is going to make it a lot easier to convert your design to a theme. This is an overview lesson that explains the strategy we'll be using in future lessons. More specifically, we'll look at:

• two popular pattern libraries
• an overview of how pages are built by Drupal so they can be rendered in a browser

By the end of this lesson you'll be able to identify components from a static design file by referencing a pattern library.

Additional resources

Atomic Design

SMACSS (Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS)

Balsamiq Mockups

In this lesson we'll take a tour of the theme you'll be building. The design we'll be working with was created by Betty Bisenthal. It's a fairly simple design with three columns and a banner image. It has been used as a starting point for several years by many people who are learning to theme. In this lesson we'll take a look at:

• the design we'll be working with
• variations of this design created by other students
• how Drupal was customized to accommodate our design
• the Sass used to create the layout for the site

By the end of this lesson you'll be able to describe the shape of the design used throughout this series, and identify variants of the design.

Additional resources

Domicile theme

Nine Sixty base theme

KidActive site

Digitise the Dawn

Emma Jane Westby introduces the series. In this series, you'll learn how to transform a static design file into a whole Drupal theme. We'll work through three major steps.

1. Develop a style guide based on the design patterns we see in our design files.
2. Build out Drupal so that it has all of the elements we need in place.
3. Work with theming files to decorate Drupal.

Additional Resources

In addition to the lessons in this series, Emma has assembled an extensive FAQ on Drupal theming.