Drupal Sprint India will have a non-stop 2 day long sprint where you can contribute by fixing bugs, writing module, documenting upcoming Drupal 7 or helping us in translating Drupal to local Indian languages.

Leading the Drupal documentation sprint is Addison Berry, lead of Drupal documentation project. So, if you are a technical writer or you are interested in documenting the best Open source CMS in the world, this is your chance to work with the real experts and learn a trick or two.

For those who love to code, we will have a large gathering of Drupal programmers around the country who will focus on improving upcoming Drupal 7 release by fixing bugs or migrating modules to Drupal 7. Those of you who love to code for Drupal, this is your chance to contribute and gain karma.

But that is not all. We have few things in store for the non-geeks, who love Drupal for its flexibility and extensive nature. Parallel to sprints, we will be holding talks and workshops to showcase case studies of successful Drupal implementation as well as we will showcase Drupal’s capabilities beyond a CMS. We will showcase Drupal’s ability to integrate with third party softwares such as a CRM, as well as Drupal’s capability to integrate with third party services such as social networking wesbite. So, if you are planning to use Drupal for your next big venture, this is the event for you. Come and meet the best Drupal brains in the country.

So book your calender for October 30-31 2009 and join us at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune to be a part of the biggest Drupal event in India ever! And yes, do not forget to register for the event, it will take few minutes only but it will help us in organizing things.

Event Links

Event Website

Register for the event

Event Update

Drupal Sprint India 2009 took place at Bhaskaraharya Pratishthan in Pune. It started at 10 in the morning on 30th October and continued till evening (6pm) of 31st October. 32 hours of non-stop coding, theming, documentation (as the event progressed through the night of 31st October too). It was all fun with lots of happening around Drupal. Parallel to the event, talks / sessions / workshops were organised for the interested people. The overall contribution to the community can be summed like this :

1. Around 10 talks were presented.

2. 2 new modules were developed.

3. 4 modules were upgraded from D6 to D7.

4. 1 new theme was developed.

5. Many pages of documentation were written.

Overall impression of the sprint in Add1sun’s words, “The event was much better than i have attended.”

Download hi-res version of this collage

It is an open-source software distributed under the GPL (“GNU General Public License”) and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers.

Drupal was originally written by Dries Buytaert, who still heads the Drupal project. Buytaert transliterated the Dutch word ‘druppel’, which means ‘droplet‘ to create the name ‘Drupal,’ in order to make an indirect reference to the community aspects of the project through the Dutch word ‘dorp’ , meaning ‘village’. He opened the source code for community work in 2001.

Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites

While some web designers have criticized Drupal as difficult to learn, the system has received extensive accolades for its usefulness and relatively rapid build time. The modular approach of Drupal and its ability to enhance the core functionality by use of hooks is a marvel of software engineering.

Drupal provides a flexible way to create custom look and feel of website by use of themes. Drupal theme essentially consists of atleast one template file, a style file for custom appearance & a theme file for overriding Drupal themeable functions. Drupal 5 comes with 4 default themes.

Where are Drupal themes located

Drupal default themes are contained in themes folder in the root installation of Drupal. Apart from themes, the folder contains theme engines available to the installation.

Another location for the themes is inside sites folder. Due to Drupal’s multi-site support, we have have individual themes available for the sites installed in the installation. Those themes need to be put under their respective sites to make them available. Sounds too boring! Let me come to point.

The recommended custom theme location in Drupal is under sites/all/themes/ folder.

Drupal Theme Administration

You need to have proper permissions to change the theme of your Drupal site. To change the default drupal theme, login to the site and then go to Theme Administration found under Site Building – Themes. The default url for the theme administration is /admin/build/themes.

By default, the garland theme is selected. The folder name of each theme represents its name on the administration page (Configurable name and description available in Drupal 6). You can change the theme by simply clicking the radio box of that theme found under default column. Saving the changes will result in applying of new theme to the site.

You can make configuration changes to the theme by clicking on the configure button found on that row. A list of default configuration options will be displayed where we can do the necessary. You can toggle the display of various page elements like search box, site name, logo, site slogan, shortcut icon, user pictures etc from this page. You can add your custom options also for the theme like in case of color picker for default garland theme.

How theme works

Drupal theme essentially consists of two files; a template file (page.tpl.php in case of phpTemplate) and a CSS file for presentation. A template file is a mix of HTML or XHTML markup alongwith the templating language specific code. Drupal by default supports PHPTemplate as the templating language through use of PHPTemplate theme engine. Theme engines control how certain themes interact with Drupal. In addition to PHPTemplate, Drupal has support for many other popular templating engines through installation of their theme engines. A theme engine makes many variables avaialable to template files and processes these template pages to render output.

In the next post of this series, I will be writing about ‘How to develop Drupal 5 theme’.