'Talking Drupal' and Tailwind CSS

In March, I was a guest again on the Talking Drupal podcast. This time I was talking about utility CSS and, in particular, the Tailwind CSS framework.

I've become a big fan of this approach to styling websites and was an early adopter of Tailwind, and have released a starter-kit theme for building custom Drupal themes with Tailwind CSS based on what I was using for my own client projects.

Rebuilding Talking Drupal with Tailwind

Usually when I give a Tailwind CSS talk at a conference or user group, I rebuild something familiar - maybe a page of their website - as an example and to explain some of the concepts and anything that was particularly interesting during the build. (I have a blog post that lists the ones that I've done before).

After this podcast episode, I built a Tailwind version of the Talking Drupal homepage.

But, given that Drupal uses Twig and that we'd talked about best practices around using a templating engine to use loops and extract components to organise code and reduce duplication, I definitely wanted to build this example using Twig templates.

Drupal seemed like too much for a single page example, and Symfony or Sculpin could distract from the main focus of the demo, so I decided to start from scratch with an empty PHP file and add Twig and any other dependencies myself.

The code repository is publicly viewable on my GitHub profile so people can look at the code and see some of the things that I talked about during the episode in practice and not just the resulting HTML a browser.

You can listen to the episode, and if you want any more information, the slides and video from my Taking Flight with Tailwind CSS talk are on my website.