One of the best ways that we've found to learn Drupal is to look at a finished site. Drupal's out-of-the-box experience doesn't really show its full potential. In our latest Drupal theming videos, we needed to build a complete website in order to provide content to "fill out" the theme being built. Once we finished that site, we thought that video viewers and others might like to be able get access and try it out for themselves. So we've done two things with the code:

1. We've uploaded the code and database to http://960robots.lullabot.com to act as a demonstration of the 960 Robots theme the we built in the videos. This is more for people to look at the front end and HTML output. We've disabled commenting and account registrations in order to keep the site in tact.
2. We've also bundled up all of the code (modules, core files, etc) along with the database dump and created a installation profile which you can download here and install just like you would install Drupal core.
3. UPDATE: We've also made available the original HTML template files with associated javascript & images so that you can follow along with the Theming Basics video.

Is This The Long-Awaited Lullabot Drupal Distribution?

Yesterday Garland got a long-overdue update: The page.tpl.php file was updated to use best practices. Now we can finally open up Garland in a workshop scenario and not have to use it as example of the bad practices within a .tpl.php file. This article applies to Drupal 6 and higher, though the theming principles apply to all versions of Drupal.

What's this about best practices? Let's compare the before and after of a few of the improvements. Each of the items below are extremely common things you can do to keep your .tpl.php files clean.