planet drupal

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. 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.

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.

A bunch of the Affinity Bridge crew went down to Seattle the weekend before last for the much anticipated Pacific North West Drupal Summit - Mack, Robin, Shiraz, Shawn, and myself (Ariane) made it down (Zoe was meant to come but picked up a cold in Italy and didn't want to contagious it to everyone), and Dave Tarc and Scott Nelson who have been collaborating on a couple projects rounded out the posse. It's always great catching up with the rest of the PNW Drupallers, it really is a hotbed of Drupal activity, and we were lucky enough to be joined by many of our Drupal friends and colleagues who came in from Portland, Idaho, and even Montana.

(Thanks for the sweet photo to Steve Krueger of The Jibe)

This past weekend was the Drupal7 Contrib Module Upgrade Sprint that Károly Négyesi (aka chx) organized at the NowPublic offices in Vancouver. I spent a good part of Saturday there, helped out with coaching the one brave beginner who turned up to learn some of the tools for helping out in the community. Otherwise, after a bit of a rough start, the devs all hunkered down and made some Drupal magic, upgrading super important things like Views, Panels, database stuff, and various other bits and pieces of modules and 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 Features module, created by the fine people at Development Seed, including a review of the challenges that led to its creation, the current state of the module, how to start using it, resources, and a note on how we've been using it ourselves.

Background

Everyone who's spent hours doing the same site configurations over and over again, for one site and then another, knows how repetitive config tends to be.  Install profiles have been the main tool for avoiding this work for the last couple years, but even with the (now defunct) install profile wizard, many people found them to be a bit overwhelming to figure out and start using at a production level.  Yet install profiles have grown to be fairly well used, especially since they can be customized and reused for certain types of sites - sport teams, churches, radio stations, languages, etc. - there's a big list of them here.

Just a reminder, we're just a month and a bit away from the PNW Drupal Summit in Seattle, October 24-25.  It's a regional conference, a little more con than a camp, a little more camp than a con...most of the AB crew is heading down for it, and I have no doubt it'll be great!

Create an account on the site to register, and mark your attendance on your profile.  For folks in the Vancouver area, there's a wiki page on g.d.o for travel planning.  And be sure to pitch a session - there are a lot of great ones already!

Big thanks to the crew in Seattle, especially Jared (aka. rocksoup) who's spearheaded the effort, for all their hard work getting this organized!

DrupalCon is about to descend on Paris in a matter of days. Sadly no, I will not be attending. But you're in luck, because our very own Disseminator of Awesome Shawn is on his way to represent Affinity Bridge and enjoy his first DrupalCon! In my absence, I thought I would write up a little DrupalCon End-User Guide of sorts, for all those first timers out there. Finding the optimal balance of geekery and socializing is key to making the most of the week, so consider these tips to lead you on the path to finding that balance.