walkah: striving towards mediocrity
Drupal Theme Workshop in Toronto
I'm excited to announce that members of the Toronto Drupal User Group have put together an exciting one day, free workshop on Drupal theming.
I will be there to present in the afternoon. Please come out and say "hi". Also, Lullabot will be sponsoring lunch (thanks guys!).
It seems like Toronto has gone Drupal crazy lately. I am loving all the local events!
The event takes place starting at 10am on November 22nd, 2008 at the Centre for Social Innovation. Be sure to check the website for full details. See you there!
VectorLover Drupal theme
Earlier this week I gave a free workshop for PHUG here in Toronto. We had a lot of fun and our scheduled one hour turned into 3 or 4 (oops!). I had a lot of fun with the group and the night received good reviews.
During the evening, we took a pure HTML and CSS design and converted it into a Drupal theme. The design is called VectorLover - freely available from styleshout.com.
I took some time this week to clean up our work, and am making "VectorLover" available for download here. Please contact me if you have any questions or comments. Enjoy!
(Note: Due to the license, this theme will not appear in the Drupal repository. Sorry!)
PHUG Workshop: Drupal Theming in an Hour
October is a busy speaking month - but I'm excited to say I've been asked back to present another (free) PHUG Workshop on Drupal.
Back in April, I did an Intro Workshop. This time, I'll be showing off theming in Drupal 6:
In this workshop, we will show the process of taking an HTML & CSS design and converting it into a fully working Drupal theme. Along the way, we’ll look at the 3 main aspects of Drupal theming, some best practices and a few tricks. Drupal 6 makes the whole process easier than ever, so get started making your Drupal site look not like a Drupal site!
The workshop is Tuesday Oct 28 2008 @ 630pm at Seneca @ York Campus in room 2112. See the workshop announcement for full details.
FSOSS is back for 2008!
One of my favorite annual free software conferences is back again! The 7th annual Free Software and Open Source Symposium is happening next week, October 23rd & 24th. I've spoken at this event 3 years in a row - it's a great event and local in Toronto!
I'll be running 2 sessions again this year:
- Drupal and Views 2: Powerful Websites in Zero Lines of Code: This workshop will cover some of the power available to Drupal site builders thanks to the awesome new Views 2 module. 2 hours, 1 site, 0 lines of code. Rock!
- Using Drupal: Community Powered Code to Run Your Site: This year's presentation will focus on the secret weapon of Drupal: the community. Drupal's success comes down to the power of the people behind it!
Check out the full schedule and register now!. Hope to see you there!
Drupal Meetup in Waterloo
As Khalid announced, I'll be heading out to Waterloo, ON tomorrow evening to give an introduction to module development with Drupal. Khalid has asked me to brush one of my old favourites: Pants module. It's a nice, fun way to get your feet wet with module development.
It will be my first visit out to the (relatively) new Waterloo Drupal Group. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone and hopefully meeting some new faces!
For full details on the event, see this post and sign up!
For those of you here in Toronto who can't make the trip, I hope to see you at next week's Toronto meeting.
Google Gears for Safari == Offline SSBs!
I'm really excited about today's (beta) release of google gears for safari. Why? because, as I've just tested, but enabling the plugin for safari it makes it available for all of my fluid app Site Specific Browsers (SSB's).
If you pay close attention here, you'll know that I'm a big fan of fluid and the idea of SSB's in general. I use apps for Remember the Milk (my current task management / GTD tool) and Google Reader extensively. Both of these sites support gears already for use offline (read: on airplanes). However, by using Fluid (based on Safari's webkit), I had to forgo gears/offline access. Thus, when traveling, I'd taken to opening a tab in firefox for each of those sites (if I remembered, and as long as I didn't need to otherwise restart firefox, etc).
Well, I just had a wonderful experience. I downloaded gears for safari, installed it... and instantly all of my fluid instances were gears enabled. Love it!
drupal at sxsw
I'm certainly not the first to post about this, but it looks like Drupal will have a strong showing at SXSW Interactive 2009. There's even a front page post on drupal.org to bring awareness. A group of us from Lullabot went last year and we had an absolute blast. If you haven't been, sign up now!
The panel picker is live and I suggest you *all* vote for Drupal with Its Pants Off (you know you wanna). What's really exciting, though, is the long list of other Drupal panels on the list.
Looks like there'll be lots of Drupal in Austin next March... even http://sxsw.com/ is Drupal powered!
My hotel is booked. See you there!
DrupalCon Szeged is coming
Sadly, I won't be there... but you should be!
I have to sit this one out due to scheduling conflicts, but the posted schedule looks really good. Of course, the Lullabot team members going are all over the schedule. Everyone should attend webchick's intro to testing and be sure to attend the testing party - she has promised chocolate!
Scanning through the schedule, it's nice to see that fellow Toronto Drupal Users Group member, Emma Jane, will be giving a presentation on Drupal for small business networks.
So, while my socks and I will only be there in spirit, you should be there in person. Register now!
Now running Drupal 6 and Views 2
I finally "re-launched" my blog last night, after tinkering for a few months. I'm now running (at the time of writing) Drupal 6.3. More interesting, however, is that my site is almost entirely powered now by Views 2.
The biggest visible change is the home page. Inspired in part by Dave Shea's lovely blog, I wanted to make my front page shorter. So now, I'm displaying the latest full post, with 9 previous titles only. This is all done with views (using the awesome new "attachment" display type).
The other interesting bit is that I'm using the latest version of twitter module so that the "twitter" block on the right is actually views2 powered as well (and gets cached).
I'm sure I'll keep tweaking, but I dig it. How about you?
Off vacation
If you're amongst the handful of people wondering where I've been and why it's been so quiet here... I've been on the road. Most recently, I was offline on vacation. Resting and recharging for the busy fall to come.
If I owe you an email - it's coming, I promise. If you like pictures - here they are.
James Walker
upcoming...
