Posts by theme: zen

I might be going a little far by continuing to call our sustainable method of theming "getting your hands dirty", but it makes me smile. So everyone will have to deal with it for at least 1 or 2 more blog posts.

On that note, I wanted to give the Drupal theming community a couple of examples of approaches we here at Palantir take for implementing a sustainable theme.  I’m going to focus specifically on a very recent method we’ve implemented at Palantir for theming Views.

Springtime is conference season, and this year has been a pretty busy one for us at Palantir. We just got back from Museums and the Web in Indianapolis last week, and it’s already time to start getting ready for next week’s CMS Expo. Fortunately, we don’t have to travel too far this time – it’s being held in Evanston, IL, which is only a few miles from our north Chicago office and also happens to be where a few of us live. CMS Expo is a training and business conference focusing on Drupal, Joomla!, Alfresco and other open source content management products. Along with our friends at Acquia, Palantir will be one of the conference’s sponsors, and a number of us will be presenting sessions as well:

Like many web developers, I’ve written a lot of applications from scratch and I inevitably got to that point where I thought, “It will be much better if I write something re-usable that will help me with any application I want to build in the future. I should write my own framework!”

And, that worked out great for a while, until I realized the fatal flaw with my idea was that I had put the emphasis on “re-usable” and had not realized the implicit “I write” part of it. Every little feature my client wants, I have to write myself. oh. joy.

So, since I was also really damn tired of having to tweak my clients’ content (“Add bike shed to the 4th paragraph and make that text blue…”), I started evaluating open-source CMSes, the usual suspects: Typo3, Mambo (soon to be Joomla), and Drupal (4.6, btw.) 

It was pretty clear, coming from the I-need-a-framework mind set, Drupal was the right choice. Good code with a backwards-compatibility-leads-to-crufty-APIs attitude. And 3 years ago today, I signed up as Drupal user 32095.

And, I did get some well-written code that fixed my DIY-misadventures. But great code turned out to be the least of what I received that day. When you join the drupal community, you get people, not just code. Brilliant, funny, heart-warming, pain-in-the-ass, cheeky, supportive, cranky, witty, lovely people. So much more than what I was looking for.

So, on the third anniversary of my joining Drupal.org, let me say thank you! Thanks, everybody!