drupal

Did you miss out on last year's PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle, here's your chance to attend! Our second annual regional Drupal developer conference is in Vancouver this year, October 2-3 at Robson Square.

Last year's conference was a fantastic weekend of sessions oriented towards developers, business/management, themers, designers, and power-user/configurers. This year is sure to be another stellar line up of presentations, workshops, and birds-of-a-feather (aka. BOF) sessions to educate and enthuse all intermediate to advanced developers, and anyone else who manages, documents, designs for, or administers any Drupal sites.

When we started transitioning into using an Agile development method just over a year ago, one of the first and most constant challenges we ran into was how to make it work for our clients. Agile has been a fantastic tool for defining internal processes that really work for us at Affinity Bridge. Many of our clients, being non-profit organizations and academic institutions, however, are accountable to boards who have to review and approve their budgets ahead of time. They're not able to bill according to work done during agile sprints, without having budgeted for the work ahead of time. Here are a few tips from the lessons we've learned for doing agile development while managing estimates and budgets in a way that works for our clients.

Last week, Zoe, Dave, and I made our way down to San Francisco for DrupalCon. It was a fantastic week, and even though I knew how many people were attending, I was still stunned by the actual size of the crowd, especially when we were all gathered together for the keynote sessions.

A few (well, three - I'm saying three counts as a few) people over at g.d.o asked to try out a module I wrote for a client of ours a few weeks ago. So I'm putting up the first beta of it here.

Behold, the first generation of the MailChimp Import module (Drupal 6 only). This module does no more, and no less, than import your MailChimp campaigns into your Drupal site as nodes. Why would you want to do that, when MailChimp already provides online versions of your newsletters? Because your client asks for it, that's why. Perhaps they want to be able to file their sent newsletters alongside their other content, in the system of taxonomy that suits their particular mental aesthetic. Perhaps they want website visitors to be able to find articles in their old newsletters from the search box in the header of their Drupal site. Perhaps they don't trust that cheerful monkey.

As a follow up to the previous post talking about our (re)branding process, we wanted to share with you some of the details of the new theme for our site, as well as a few configuration changes, and what we learned.

960 Grid-based Theme

In an earlier post, our theme lead Alberto talked a bit about CSS Frameworks, including the 960 Grid System, which is compatible with Drupal's Zen framework. Those are two of the main tools in his theming toolkit, so we made sure to get a theme designed that would comply with using the grid system. Alberto then took the layout CSS file from the 960 Framework and substituted that for the layout CSS file in Zen, but otherwise used all the other Zen files.

Earlier this week, following much anticipation, we launched our website redesign (if you're reading this via RSS, check it out! http://affinitybridge.com), which has been in the works for several months. It began as a rebranding of the company logo, then new business cards, and finally the website. When we began this redesign process with Kirsti Wakelin, who did the design for all three, we had to spend some time considering and reconsidering what we wanted to convey with our logo and branding. Affinity Bridge has always tied itself to the imagery of bridges. We had to ask ourselves if that was something that still spoke to us, and that we felt still spoke to the people and organizations we work with.

Unless you're able to travel to the US, it's not often that we Vancouverites get the chance to go to a theming workshop put on by the author of one of the most well loved, and well used Drupal theming books to date.

January 11, 2010, Emma Jane Hogbin, co-author of Front End Drupal, is coming to town and is putting on a one-day workshop for 20 keen beginner themers.

The workshop will be geared towards people who have previous HTML/CSS experience and at least a familiarity with PHP. It will focus on bringing those basic skills and sharpening them with a focus on how to work with the Drupal theming system.

The Workshop

Front End Drupal is focuses on issues of site design, behavior, usability, and management. The focus is to show how to style Drupal sites, make the most of Drupal’s powerful templating system, build sophisticated community sites, streamline site management, and build more portable, flexible themes.

This post is part of our Abridged series, which aims to explain the basics of some of the more ominous yet awesome Drupal projects in simple and practical terms. We hope these posts will help demystify some of these projects for people who have been hesitant to try them out!

Here, we'll take a look at the SimpleTest module/framework, including a review of its history within the Drupal project, the current state of the module, how to start using it, resources, and a note on how we've been using it ourselves. HUGE thanks to Drupal SimpleTest co-maintainer Rok Zlender for teaching us about using SimpleTest when he was in Vancouver last summer - the code samples are care of Rok's example custom test.

This post was originally posted on my personal blog, but we thought it was worth sharing here.

This one’s all Drupal folks, cause that’s pretty much all I’ve done for the last two and a half weeks. This is what happened when I asked the question, “Is there some reason we don’t just fix it all?” I did not know then what I was getting myself into…

A small inconsistency

It all started in late summer, when I was testing some Drupal 7 core patches for moving fields and image handling into core, and at some point clicked my way into the Help pages. There was a blatant typo on the Node module help, and then a change in language that needed to be made, so on August 1st, 2009 I created an issue for it.

You may have heard or read comments similar to the following about CSS frameworks:

"They are not flexible enough."
"It's too much useless code."
"I like to keep my CSS clean."
"Why do I need a framework if I know what I'm doing?"
"The site is not going to change, so we don't need a CSS framework."

A CSS framework cannot be expected to be the final solution to all your problems, but it can be a useful tool for structuring and theming your site more efficiently. Read on to learn more about what CSS frameworks are, pros and cons of using them, existing framework options, and related themes.

What exactly is a CSS framework?

Every time you start a new project there are several basic lines of code that you add to your CSS; you may want to remove the default margins added by the browsers, set the font size to 12px as the browser standard, create a popular layout, etc.