Drupal Watchdog Magazine (Issue 1, Volume 2)

This issue of Watchdog focuses on the process of planning, creating, and theming Drupal websites. Jeffrey Dalton eloquently initiates the discussion in The Hybrid Designer, making a compelling case for the importance of being well-versed in the abilities and limitations of the underlying technologies that will be used to implement a website design. He argues for stepping away from the stilted separation of design and back-end development to optimize the website building process, avoiding budget bloat and helping ensure success. Drupal's theming layer controls the look and feel of a website, allowing the default presentation of content to be overridden and customized. Michael J. Ross presents a detailed feature comparison of 18 commonly-used Drupal 7 Starter Themes to consider working from when designing a website. In Thinking Inside the Box, Emma Jane Hogbin explores the aesthetics and usefulness of grid systems in her tutorial on building a theme on the 960gs CSS grid framework. Morten DK's article on DeDrupalizing the Login Form offers a useful example of Drupal 7's new ability to modify forms within the theme layer. In Drupal 7, Meet 2012's HTML, Morten examines HTML5 and how it can be leveraged in Drupal 7. Emma Jane Hogbin provides a themer's introduction to essential PHP, answering the question What's That PHP Doing In My Theme? And in Creating Specialized Layouts with Panelizer, Lynette Miles shows readers how to customize the display of specific website content; for example, altering the look and feel of individual articles, user profiles, or taxonomy vocabularies.