Taming Content the Drupal Way

Drupal makes it possible to quickly build dynamic websites that present content in very customized ways. Creating content types and adding fields is relatively easy. However, knowing how to effectively architect a Drupal site and then implement a design on top of it is not always obvious.

Drupal comes with a couple content types, Page and Story. It allows you to add additional content types. With the Content Construction Kit module and other field plugin modules, they allow you add fields, in addition to just the Title and Body fields, to any content type. In most cases theming content is pretty straight forward. A large portion is made easy with display settings for each content type and reordering of fields. In most cases you can then style with CSS and be done with it. Often theming a field additionally requires overriding markup with a field specific template or creating a custom field formatter. Other modules, like Panels and Views are affected by the display settings of a field.

This session will cover best practices for controlling appearance and manipulating output for content, also known as theming. Attendees will leave this session knowing how to reorder fields and edit content type display settings for optimal CSS based theming. Examples will be given of when to use templates to override markup and field formatters to further control HTML output. We'll also discuss changes in fields in Drupal 7.