While training some newcomers to Drupal theming in 2011, I came across a big, big problem in Drupal: Theming is hard. Really hard. And even harder to teach.

How did it get this way? Up through Drupal 7, the theme system had grown in a very organic way. New ideas and APIs were proposed and bolted on: theme() functions. Preprocess functions. Process functions. Render arrays. render()/show()/hide(). Theme wrappers. Alter hooks. #theme callback overrides.

Over time, we were left with, well...a bunch of bolts. What shipped with Drupal 7 wasn't *designed* -- it was years of ideas layered like the sediment of the earth's crust. And only until we cut away at these layers did we see where we had come. So we decided things needed changing. We had a core conversation in Denver where we proposed: "What if we started over? What would we build?"

Gulp...

The Twig initiative is but a piece of the larger task of cleaning up the entire Drupal theming ecosystem. While Twig is well underway to change the syntax of how we write markup, we have much bigger ideas for what it means to render content.

This session will summarize and boil down some of the ideas of https://github.com/c4rl/renderapi into an approachable and thought-provoking exploration.

This session will introduce those ideas to the community, the challenges involved, and how to get involved.