Foreword

At DrupalCon Barcelona in 2007, while giving my regular “State of Drupal” presentation, I remarked that during my hour-long session, four new Drupal sites would be launched. I went on to suggest that three of those four sites would be ugly. A year later, at DrupalCon Szeged in Hungary, those four new sites per hour had grown to seven and Drupal 6 had been released, making it easier to create great-looking Web sites. Still, even now, Drupal faces a common problem on the Web—the relative lack of new, high quality themes.

Front End Drupal tackles that problem directly and is designed to help both experienced designers and rank novices get an understanding of how Drupal theming works. From using contributed “starter themes,” to customizing templates to modify the markup used in Drupal’s output, to using jQuery and JavaScript to enhance the user experience, Front End Drupal clearly charts a path to theming mastery. In fact, I’ll be the first to admit that I learned a lot from this book.

The Drupal community has created a remarkable platform that powers sites of all sizes and descriptions, all around the world. Together, we’ve crafted a robust, extensible content-management system that illustrates some of the key values in our community: flexibility and utility, innovation and openness. But Drupal has always been a developer’s platform, even with the many designers in our ranks. It’s about time those designers had a great book. In fact, this book is valuable not just to the designers we have, but to the designers we want—the thousands who have never worked with Drupal.

The thing is that creating a Drupal theme isn’t always easy. It’s a crosscutting experi ence that requires a lot of diverse skills and utilizes expertise in XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP, all within the context of Drupal. Doing a Drupal theme right can be challenging, but it is also exciting and incredibly rewarding. A survey I conducted in 2008 listed “Finding skilled Drupal designers” as the number one entry on the list of the “Top five most difficult things,” as reported by both expert and novice users. We need to do more to find new themers, as well as encourage and support the ones we already have.

I’m excited that Emma Jane and Konstantin recognized that and authored this book. It fills an important need in the Drupal ecosystem and will bring a new attention to design in Drupal. Since I’ve mostly focused on the “back end,” it’s nice to see the “front end” get more and more attention. For Drupal to succeed, we need books like this. We need the skills it teaches and we need the people it attracts. We need the new themes those people will create and the new suggestions and improvements they bring to our project.

Dries Buytaert

Drupal founder and project lead