Believe it or not, Drupal makes theming easy... especially in Drupal 8!

Drupal provides the themer with a system of overrides that allows you to change literally anything on your site. Themers decide what gets printed to the screen and what doesn't - essentially what lives and dies. For this and other reasons, themers have ultimate control.

Don't let it get to your head though. Before you can make Drupal bend to your will, you have to introduce yourself via the .info file. From there, you can control style with the CSS we've all come to love. Want to add in your own divs, regions, classes, etc? That will require copying and tweaking one of Drupal's template files (a super easy process).

Following this easy pattern, you can get most of the way there without writing PHP. Even if you need to extend the way that breadcrumbs, pagers or other Drupal elements work via the template.php file, you can usually find a friendly companion on Drupal.org who has code you can copy and use without having to fully understand it.

Learning Objectives

Maybe you've built a theme in Drupal 7, or maybe you haven't; this session assumes nothing and walks you down the road to building your first theme in Drupal 8 from the ground up. We will describe the anatomy of a theme and apply it to a theme we'll be creating together. We will discuss crucial Drupal building blocks and best practices to apply to your own projects. We'll cover handy tools to make your job easier. As we go, we'll explain the key differences between theming in D7 and D8.

Past Experience

Theming is my passion, and I'm excited to keep the passion hot in Drupal 8. I've specialized in Drupal theming since 2010 when I started working for Chapter Three, where I developed the extremely popular Beginner Theming session (for Drupal 7) and Level Up Your Themer curriculum, which is still being taught today. Since leaving Chapter Three in 2013, I've provided several Theming-related sessions at user group meetups, several camps, Drupalcon Portland, and both public and private training workshops.

Who Should Attend

• Front end developers who want to override what a particular theme or module is giving them
• Experienced Drupal 7 themers who want to learn what has changed in Drupal 8
• Anyone who wants to learn how build a theme from scratch
• Drupal beginners who just want to see what is involved with the theming system