By John, 7 May, 2012

I often get asked about recommendations I may have for good resources for learning CSS. I learned CSS during the dark ages. The only online resource was the spec itself (light blue paper background and all.) So I’ve never had a need to go out and find good CSS resources.

By John, 18 April, 2012

This Friday through Sunday, I’m going to San Francisco to attend a sprint to “rebuild the theme layer” in Drupal 8. This is the next exciting step in a journey I started nearly 3 years ago.

I’ll hope you’ll join me at the sprints as we combat Drupal 7 and the Arrays of Doom!

A Drupalcon 2012 film: Drupal 7 and the Arrays of Doom
Modified slightly from a tweet by @SGreenwellUT

Scene 1. [Day break. Our themer is hunched over his keyboard writing awesome themes in Drupal 6, but he’s troubled.]

By John, 16 January, 2012

Kevinjohn Gallagher recently wrote “WordPress has left the building”, expressing his colleagues’ and clients’ frustration at trying to use WordPress when CMS capabilities are required. His 15 points of pain for developing usable sites with WordPress are an interesting list for Drupal developers as well. We have good solutions (that are still improving!) for many of the items on that list. Yet, we still share a few of those pain points with WordPress.

Unfortunately, Kevinjohn has been getting attacked by many of the WordPress community. While many WP fans have been writing “How WordPress took the CMS crown, his piece about his agency dropping WordPress as its go-to website solution as provoked vitriol. Over at the WP Tavern, he writes:

[…] there are more posts on WordPress community sites discussing my CV and dyslexia than the actual content of my post.
Sadly in the last 7 days I’ve had 3 ddos attacks, 14 threats (4 “credible”) against myself or my family, multiple requests to have me removed from speaking at WordPress events
By John, 23 November, 2011

The Zen theme had its fifth birthday on October 11, 2011. While that milestone just slipped past without my notice, I’ve recently been thinking a lot about things that I’m grateful for. Zen, like Drupal core, improves because of the influx of new ideas and solutions to shared problems. And I’m extremely thankful to all those that have contributed their work.

More than simply saying “Thank you” to all those who’ve contributed patches to both the code and the documentation, I’ve decided to convert each contributor’s name into an actual Git commit. That sounds pretty geeky, but the real purpose of those commits is so each person’s name shows prominently where it belongs… on Zen’s Maintainers page.

I have a really useful Git tip for project maintainers below. But I’d also ask that you please join me (in the comments of this post) in thanking all of the people who have contributed to make Zen great.