Posted by jcfiala on October 25, 2010 at 3:10pm
Start:
2010-11-10 18:30 - 21:00 America/Denver Organizers:
Event type:
User group meeting
Come on down to the Denver/Boulder Drupal Meetup for our next meeting at Boulder Digital Arts! Expect pizza provided by yours truly, and Drinks provided by Boulder Digital Arts.
This month it looks like we're going to have a look at theming your site, and I'm trying to think of another short subject to go into alongside that. If you've got a particular question or a topic you would like to discuss/present, please feel free to drop me a line or comment on this post. We'll also need to discuss what to do about our December meeting, as BDA already has something scheduled for the second Wednesday in December.
Location:
Boulder Digital Arts
1600 Range Street #100
Boulder, CO 80304
(303) 800-4647
How to find us
We'll be in the Arapahoe Studio - it's easy to find.
Comments
Possible Topic - Log Files & Debugging
I'm still fairly new to Drupal and I'd like to know more about the log files that Drupal generates. Which files are generated? What's in each file? Mostly I'd like to know this info for debugging purposes. If something is going wrong on my site, how do I start tracking down what's going on? Should I be looking at a log file, or somewhere else?
Aside from the standard
Aside from the standard Apache and PHP logs which exist on the filesystem, many Drupal-related errors are logged to the database at admin/reports/dblog.
When developing your own modules, you can use the watchdog() function to add information to this log. http://api.drupal.org/api/function/watchdog
The Devel module http://drupal.org/project/devel is essential for module development, especially the dpm() function http://drupalcontrib.org/api/function/dpm
Possible topics
I'd really like to see a session on SEO questions and answers. A second topic would be practical advice on using images.
A comment on theming. A professional Drupal developer has told me that it is wise to ever use a Drupal theme for my site. Are there reasons for this other than selling me a custom theme?
themes
Ah - did you mistype and mean to say 'it is not wise to ever use a Drupal theme'? Because otherwise your question doesn't make sense. That said, I wouldn't agree with the statement - there's quite a lot of themes out there, and a number of them are quite good, such as the fusion theme, and probably all of the ones with acquia in the name, to start with. There's probably some which aren't worth trying out - personally I'd start with looking through issue queues. But there's perfectly good themes out there on drupal.org.
-john
some options
I agree with John,
Aside from D.O there are several reputable Drupal theme companies such as http://www.woothemes.com/ and http://www.topnotchthemes.com/ that supply flexible pre-built themes. The real reason you should have a custom theme is that you and your business are unique and creating a custom theme that it is suited for optimizing the indexable quality of your content for search relevance.
-- Zach (attack) Meyer
Site online with the presentation
For those who weren't at the meetup and/or those who don't remember, I have created a site at http://theming.isaacsonwebdevelopment.com with the presentation. Today I even added a small custom module that allows me to give an example of themable functions, which is something that I didn't have time to pull together for the meeting.
You can register at the site and choose which theme you want to see the presentation shown in. If you want to see the effect of the override to the themable function you will need to change your theme to "theme4."
Enjoy!