Attended Drupaldelphia at Alter Hall at Temple University today. I took the journey to Philly with Mark, he drove since he knows Philadelphia much better than I. He actually knew many facts about various buildings and areas.
The facilities at Temple were very impressive. Great sized lecture rooms, with 2 large screens and electrical outlets everywhere for everyone’s laptops. The wifi was also great too, didn’t have a single issue once I logged in.
All the sessions I attended were pretty solid too.
- Open Academy: A higher education Drupal product for departmental websites
- Keynote
- Building a backend content administrators will love
- Making Site Mobile Friendly
- Ten Steps to Becoming a Panels Pro
Some very good and insightful stuff. Picked up some new tricks and gained confidence in some cases, knowing that what I had been doing in some cases is what was suggested as best practice too.
The mobile and content administration stuff were very relevant to some current projects I’m working on. So the timing couldn’t of been better.
Lunch was pretty amazing too. I wasn’t expecting much of anything, but it was really good. Just the right amount of food too. They also gave out free t-shirts too. So now I have another Drupal shirt.
All in all an extemely very well done event. Drupal continues to be an amazing platform. I’m so glad that I attended and definitely am looking forward to another one next year.
A client really wanted to make use of the built in WordPress gallery shortcode. It’s a really cool built in feature to WordPress that easily allows them to manage basic photo galleries. But we wanted the gallery thumbnails to be generated in a sidebar, not the actual Page or Post.
This took a bit of time to figure out how to do, but luckily it was right in front of me in the WordPress documentation. I just entered the following in the sidebar.php file (just gallery in the brackets):
echo do_shortcode('[the-word-gallery-goes-here]');
You can add that standard gallery shortcode options to that as well. So simple, I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to figure this one out.
I really dislike using Adobe Contribute CS5. It was a great solution many years ago before the web based CMS has become so easy to use. However, I do work with some sites that are still based on it (for now) and do have to tolerate it.
Recently it’s been crashing every single time I’ve started up the application. As you can imagine this can pose quite a serious problem. I attempted all the tricks, even a clean uninstall then reinstall of the application on OSX.
I finally stumbled across a discussion thread that saved the day for me!
Deleting the folder “ConnectionsHomeOMBackend”
(user)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/extensions/ConnectionsHomeOMBackend/
fixed the crashing on startup issues. Thanks so much for the folks who took the time to share this on the forums. I was really beginning to grow a bit scared that there wasn’t a fix for this.
I remember hearing that you could add, edit and arrange fields for storing user data in Drupal 7, but initially couldn’t figure out just where to do this. This pretty much does what the Profile module had done in previous versions.
Just go to:
Configuration > People > Account Settings
Then click on the Manage Fields tab, and then just manage the fields just like you would for a Content Type.
It’s so simple. If you feel that you need more features than what’s provided in core, the Profile 2 module seems like something worth checking out.
Day 3 was pretty cool. I walked over to the West Egg Cafe for an early breakfast. Got blueberry and granola pancakes which they called crunchberry pancakes. They were massive and very good.
The Keynote Speaker was very entertaining. It was usability expert Jared Spool. He gave a good presentation, and had much of the room laughing at times.
Workbench: Managing Content Management
About the Workbench module. This modules seems great and will be a perfect fit for atlantic.edu to manage users and the content publishing process. This is a very exciting module and I look forward to using it.
Drupal Commerce: Setting up Shop on Drupal 7
This was an excellent presentation. It’s great to see just how much hard work goes into module development. I’m going to have to seriously consider whether or not to go with this one right away or not. Great job.
Drupal 7 Theming Basics
Wasn’t a big fan of this one. There were a lot of errors on the slides, it seemed a bit hurried.
Building awesome user interfaces with Drupal 7′s Form, AJAX, and Theme systems
I was just plain old burned out at this point. There was some cool stuff demonstrated, but I thought it was a bit too much for me to follow at times.
Night Exploration
I walked over to the massive Apple Store then stopped by Giordano’s to get some dinner. I went with the Italian beef sandwich not the deep dish pizza. I then walked in some other random stores for warmth, stopping in the Giaradelli store for a yummy peanut butter something sundae. It was great.
I then stopped in the Disney store to see if they had Thanos. They didn’t, but oh well I continued to explore more of Michigan Ave. The shopping is really weird to me, Floors are kinda small, but many many stories tall. I know it makes sense given the buildings here, but it still seemed rather strange to me.
On my way back to the hotel I let some bum sucker me into a shoe shine. Yep, that’s right I got my sneakers which should of been thrown out 4 months ago shined. I feel so dirty and scammed right now, but just didn’t have it in me to say no. I’m really getting exhausted from this whole adventure.
I work up early and took a walk around the city in the rain to find something to eat for breakfast. I would up at some simple bagel shop. It was nothing too special. Then the sessions began.
Views Demystified
I found this session to be very useful. It started a bit on the slow side and I was beginning to feel that it was going to be a waste of time. But then out of the blue the attachment display was mentioned. For reasons that cannot be explained I wasn’t aware of this in Views. This alone was amazing to discover.
Making Beautiful Maps
This session was ok. The openlayers library and TileMill are two things that I will be checking out. The guys were extremely knowledgeable, but at times a bit too much over my head.
Design Thinking
The panel was great, but I really didn’t like the session. There really wasn’t any solid point to it for me. They just played a few videos and just seemed to be winging it at times.
Baby Got Backend: Content Administrators are Users Too
This was a pretty goos sesssion, the content admins are very important to me when developing a site. They had some very useful tips. I just wish they had shown some actual examples.
Drupal 7 JavaScript for Developers
I didn’t know what to expect, this can be a very difficult subject. The presenters did do an excellent job though. Good suggestions of examples and going over #states was great. Some very useful stuff here that I’m bound to use in the not too distant future.
Lego Store
I did make a trek (actually just 3 blocks or so) to the Lego Store. They had some amazing sculptures there. Including a life size Darth Vader and R2-D2! So glad I stopped here for some photos.
I also managed to walk around the city a bit too. Some amazing buildings here, with impressive sights all over the place. I never got that creepy feeling where you feel like you have to be on alert while walking around. It was really pleasant minus the damp rain.
Attended Drupaldelphia at Alter Hall at Temple University today. I took the journey to Philly with Mark, he drove since he knows Philadelphia much better than I. He actually knew many facts about various buildings and areas.
