Contribute a Theme!

It's no secret that Drupal has long been infamous as the "ugly"CMS. Thanks to the introduction of some great looking and popular websites (whitehouse.gov, Warner Brother's artists' sites) Drupal's capacity for eye candy is evident, but Drupal still lags far behind Wordpress in both reputation and the availability of free, community contributed themes.

Lots of factors contribute to this problem. The learning curve for Drupal's theming system discourages many designers from attempting a Drupal theme, the scalability and flexibility of Drupal as a CMS make creating a theme for multiple use cases a daunting task, and the developer-dominated world of drupal.org and particularly the CVS account application process provide a barrier for designers who want to simply share their work with the rest of the community.

This session would discuss tips and demonstrate tools for making the transition from building one-use custom themes to creating flexible, robust and sustainable themes that work across a variety of applications. In addition it will teach the CVS account application process, how to get your theme distributed on drupal.org and what to expect in the issue queue once you're a maintainer.

The end result of this session is that all attendees will come away with the confidence and desire to build and contribute their own theme!