JoeDag32

Overall the sessions were pretty solid on day 1.

Introduction to Module Development

This session was great. Even though I’ve made modules and gone through dozens of tutorials on how to do so, having someone right there go over the process was perfect. The speaker did an excellent job of describing the steps and tips along the way.

Notable highlights include the dpm() function as well as debug_backtace(). His explanation of how to get variables  from a page was huge. I was stumped on drilling down several arrays and objects, but now I think I’ve gotten it.

Rockin’ HTML5 with Drupal

This session was packed, with people sitting on the floor and outside the doors. It really shows just how much interest there is in html5 right now. The htnl 5 Tools Module is one that I will have to give a look at. I’ve been studying up on html5 a bit recently, so not much of the session was new to me. But it was well presented and they did give out stickers.

Crafting App Interfaces with jQuery

The presenter was hilarious. That alone made the session pretty solid. The material covered seemed a bit too advanced for the audience at times and didn’t tie into Drupal quite enough as I had hoped it would. Overall it was ok, and I will be checking out .live() in jQuery.

Views for Hackers

I’m sorry, but this session wasn’t at all what I was expecting it to be. The presenter was without a doubt brilliant, but I was hoping for more examples of what could be done with Views compared to it’s history and how it actually works.

Field Museum

The conference booked the Field Museum for it’s opening night party. The place was amazing inside and out. It reminded me very much of Night  at the Museum, and maybe even was where it was filmed, probably should look that up when I get a sec.

The exhibits were great, and at times I felt like I had the entire museum to myself. I’ve posted many photos on Flickr. Having woken up at 2:30 that morning and flown in, I was pretty hungry and tired. So I destroyed the yummy buffet. And when I say destroyed that is not an understatement. Numerous attendees passing by did inquire if I hadn’t eaten in days from my behavior. Plus the food was pretty good too!

The big exhibit was Sue, the largest, most complete and preserved Tyrannasaurus rex in the world. She was most impressive indeed

Woke up at 2:30 this morning to catch an early flight into Chicago to attend DrupalCon. Driving to Philadelphia International Airport was a cinch. Being the only fool up that early on the road does make for easy travel. I did see a man vomiting outside of his car on the ride over. That was rather interesting.

I did get a little lost looking for parking at the airport. I kinda drive out of the whole place then had to get back in. Luckily a really nice guy working for Southwest helped me out. The plane took off on time and we even got there 10 minutes early!

On the ride I sat next to Paul, who described himself as a Chatty Cathy. He was a rather talkative fellow, but it did make the time pass rather quickly. It turns out he owns a software company and is looking to hire a front-end developer. So we had much to discuss, and we did eventually agree on how much he should pay his future hire.

I arrived at the Sheraton just in time to catch the opening keynote. So I pretty much had perfect timing today. The opening keynote was pretty solid, but it seemed like they were pushing the Kool-Aid a bit too much at times. The numerous videos and blasting of a song Proud (or something like that) id get old rather fast.

I just ate lunch from a box. It wasn’t that bad. I happened to be sitting next to Jeremy Keith, who happens to of written one of my favorite books of the past few years. He was a really friendly guy, it was really nice to meet someone who really taught me a lot about how I script today in person.

My phone just rang and my room is ready, so I’m going to get my key drop my stuff off then catch the next session. I’ll post more after my sessions.

Haven’t played around with the Google Visualization API in a little bit, so I was quite pleasantly surprised to learn of some very nice new features and improved documentation since my last encounter. Mind you, it was very impressive to me 18 or so months ago, but now has gotten better in so many ways.

First off,  the getting started examples are great and can get anyone with basic web skills making static or interactive charts in no time. The Code Playground is also very useful to play around with, making changes and seeing the result on the fly is very convenient.

The new pie chart is great. It’s improved appearance and tool tips are very welcomed. It has a much more polished look to them.

Here’s an example I threw together in just a few minutes.

I’ve just begun upgrading a Drupal 6 custom theme to Drupal 7. And after a couple of attempts at cleaning up my theme (ok, numerous attempts), things started to render correctly.

However, I did notice that the taxonomy terms that I had removed from node.tpl.php in my Drupal 6 theme were now appearing in 7. After some investigation, I did notice that while logged in as admin, under Structure > Content Types > then manage display for the respective content type you could make certain Fields hidden.

While it took me a little bit of adjustment to find at first, this is great. I just set the Label and Format to field I didn’t want to display on my Page to <hidden> and all is well again.

I’ve been converting a pretty big site over to Drupal 6 recently and have been trying to get the CKEditor to very closely appear like the sites CSS styles. By default it was doing an ok job, but not good enough for how the site’s content managers would be working with it.

Through a bit of research I did find an excellent tutorial on the subject. This was a tremendous help and exactly what I was looking to do.

Just a few simple adjustments in the ckeditor.config.js was all it took.

First I just changed the value of:

config.bodyId = '';

Now the majority of my site’s styles were cascading onto the CKEditor. There were still some minor tweaking that needed to be done.

Adding a few lines using:

config.extraCss += "";

and I was all set. Now the CKEditor editor is displaying content almost identically than how it will actually appear on the site.

I finally got around to upgraded this blog from YUI2 to YUI3. The site doesn’t feature too much scripting so, switching over was extremely easy.

First I converted the Grid layout of the site. The YUI3 CSS Grid was very simple to switch to, and made sense fairly quickly. I’ve been using YUI2 Grids for a while, so initially the changes in YUI3 seemed a bit foreign, but the differences did sink in and I’ve found it to be a more flexible grid to work with. A grid builder like the one offered for YUI2 would be a very welcome addition.

I’m also making use of YUI3 Tabview. Again, I was using a very basic example of it so switching over was a breeze. Actually just had to remove a little markup.

I really do like the new approach in YUI3. It’s well worth the investment of taking a few minutes of reading through the documentation. The flexibility and potential there for growth is great. Very good stuff.