Click here to watch Dapper Drupal - Custom Tailored Themes.

Base themes are a great place to start when you’re first getting into theming. As you grow as a front-end developer, you’ll find your old standby base theme no longer fits. You’re a grown up now; it’s time to dress to the nines.

Why build a base theme?

By necessity, base themes make assumptions about how teams and individuals work. By rolling your own, you’ll become much more comfortable and informed about the Drupal theming layer, and have a better launchpad for your front-end projects.

In this session, we’ll talk about creating a custom base theme tailored for your development process; one that enhances your team’s strengths and minimizes its weaknesses, offering clear advantages over contributed base themes. We’ll identify common front-end problems, and demonstrate how a custom base theme can solve them in a reusable way. We’ll look at how others are using base themes to improve their development process and share what we’ve learned developing Center and Prototype, an evolving pair of themes we’ve created that enable us to quickly build a front-end that fits our workflow.

Garrett Dawson

Garrett is a front-end developer who has been working with Drupal for the past several years, and has built many productions sites using popular contributed themes, like Zen and Tao.

John Ferris

John has been building websites since 2000. He has developed Drupal themes for a wide range of clients including M.I.T., The Smithsonian Institute, The United Nations, and Examiner.com.