Slides for the presentation about Drupal's Omega Theme I gave at the Alpine Drupalcamp 2011 in Brixen, Italy

1. Drupal 7 Ninja Theming
How Context + Delta + Omega will blow your old
themes up

2. A quick introduction
Claudio Beatrice
Developer
@omissis twitter
http://silent-voice.org blog
http://agavee.com team
Co-founder of the ‘Drupal Italia’ Association
Skylogic S.P.A. - Turin (IT)
Satellite telecommunications
C, PHP, Drupal, Java, Javascript, MySQL, LDAP
Go On Media - Paris (FR)
Internet Media
PHP, Zend, Javascript, HTML, CSS
Agavee - Somewhere in Northern Italy :)
Web Development
PHP, Drupal, Symfony, Javascript, jQuery

3. and some credits
Jake Strawn
Developer, Themer, Designer
twitter @himerus
email jake.strawn@himerus.com
blog http://himerus.com
Sebastian Siemssen
Developer
twitter @thefubhy

4. Alright then, what makes
Omega so special?

5. It sits on the
shoulders of giants
It’s an evolved implementation
of the ninesixty Drupal
theme which, in turn, is based
upon the 960 grid system
by Nathan Smith
It gets inspiration (and features)
from the most appreciated Drupal
themes such as Acquia Marina,
Zen, Fusion and Studio

6. Down with the gridness
960gs helps you to save time and to reduce
frustration by streamlining your front-end
development and insuring (what Yahoo
determines as) A-grade browsers compatibility
http://sonspring.com/journal/960-grid-system

7. Down with the gridness
Drupal (well, the guy who developed
ninesixty) brought 960gs even further by
adding some more functionalities to the
framework such as:
• push & pull classes (backported to 960gs)
• ns() function for contextual widths of grid
elements
• grid overlay and debugging tools
• RTL language support
All these features are available in Omega

8. A Saucerful of inspirations
960gs features
• 12, 16, 24, 32 column options
• Each zone has its own container options, which allows
for mixed layouts
• no need to use ns() function in most situations
• template_preprocess_page() handles this based on theme
settings
• theme-settings.php gives extensive theme settings to base
theme & all sub themes based on Omega
• content first (.push & .pull) options

9. A Saucerful of inspirations
Non-960gs features
• Custom page titles
• Alternate settings for <front> and other pages
• Custom separator
• Custom breadcrumbs
• On/off toggle for breadcrumbs
• Custom separator
• Toggle “home” link in breadcrumb
• Append current page to end of breadcrumb
• Mission statements
• Choose to display on <front> only or all pages

10. Hey! But there’s moar!
• Highly customizable theme settings that let
you configure your layout in a few clicks
• XHTML and HTML5 subthemes
• Delta and Context modules give you the
ability to create separated theme
configurations and use them depending on
the conditions of your choice with no LOC
• Drush integration lets you spawn new
subthemes and export/revert their
configuration in a matter of seconds

11. Let’s take a quick tour

18. Don’t call him baby
• Easily extendable: cleanly integrate custom
grids is a matter of a few LOC
• Well documented: it has a dedicated website
with plenty of resources and videos
• Fast development pace
• Growing community

19. Ok ok, you got me. Ain’t it a
little bit too fat tho?
‘Course not! :) But let’s pretend it
is so I am allowed to introduce
the upcoming version...

20. Omega 3
it’s good for your heart
• Segmentation of Alpha & Omega
• this will allow users to enable core functionalities without
the added weight of some advanced features
• Zone/Region Flexibility
• ability to freely reassign zones and regions through the
interface (Omega UI)
• branding zone configurable through UI, less region--
branding-tpl.php tweaking
• Region Ordering improvements
• static & dynamic zones will be both allowed to be ordered
• finer control on how zones appear and are rendered
(with all the consequences on SEO)
• Performance Enhancements
• Preprocess/process, Css, Theme settings
• Optional CSS Loading

21. Omega 3
it’s good for your heart
• Responsive Grids
• Adaptive layouts through customizable
@media queries or javascript as fallback (IE )
• Good number of tweaks available such as
optional grid styles and viewport/scale settings
• Default layouts: mobile (region stacked),
narrow (720px), normal (960px), wide
(1200px)

22. Omega 3
it’s good for your heart
You oughta watch the entire video: http://bit.ly/e4zAt0

23. References
http://960.gs
http://himerus.com
http://developmentgeeks.com
http://omega.developmentgeeks.com
http://drupal.org/project/omega
http://groups.drupal.org/omega-framework
http://silent-voice.org

24. Thank you for watching!

25. One last thing...™

26. The DrupalCon London
• 22 - 25 August
• Fairfield Halls,
Croydon
• 1500+ expected
attendees
• Loads of awesome
sessions, Jack
Strawn’s included!
• Fish and chips! :)))