Drupal meetup in Old Town Pasadena on August 1, 2011

I'll be there.

I am very sorry. I was planning on giving a talk for newcomers on how to get started with Drupal but have had to stay home from work due to an injury. I will not be able to make the meetup tonight. If you are planning on presenting at DrupalCamp please, please contact Scott for a practice run tonight.

Thank you very much,

Matt

There were very motivated attendees wanting to absorb everything Drupal, along with talented presenters. We started with a technical Q&A.

Before going into the night's topics, I need to tell you to VOTE at www.DrupalCampLA.org NOW, so the organizers can get a head count per session, and assign initial classrooms, and schedule time slots for the presenters. Please vote Tuesday! The start time will be Saturday 9 AM (it's believed), with registration starting at 8:30. It's free to attend, so register for 2 days of Drupal classes! Ok, that plug done. Now, to the night's juicier tidbits.

An Internationalization bug was introduced by Jason. The feature works, except for the part where if a page is not available in one of the designated languages, then the default language page is not displayed. Any one know of the solution? Perhaps it's just an install configuration issue?

Pete talked about the many CAPTCHA modules for Guestbook, as Mollom has a patch for Guestbook, but an older version. Modules such as Ban IP, making a site read only for those IPs, Hidden Field CAPTCHA, Random CAPTCHA, that works will when weak CAPTCHAs are not used (Pete is using Math and Image), adding more CAPTCHAs to Random, the new ones released. It was mentioned that reCaptcha has been cracked.

Mike volunteered to demo Omega. Not a recap of his Delta module with Omega, but just on Omega, a grid system with fluid capability. He had a second website to demo it with. It appears to be his new Theme of choice, due to more drag and drop options, avoiding any template editing. He showed us Regions and weights. And Normal/Narrow/Fuild/Wide, where Narrow was set with a set of "AND" clauses, for being the browser window width being narrower than 720 (his choice), to use a different set of theming options. He demonstrated how turning off all the CSS style sheets, using an Omega feature, would result in blocks being vertically aligned, something useful for small handheld screens. The "hide" feature, to non display the site name, site slogan and page title was useful for SEO, as it maintains the values in the page, just does not display them, until other theme turn "off" features for these fields.

And then it became it case study of tricks used on the new web site, as follows. The bio images for staff were swapped upon rollover, or tab focus, using javascript for focus (tabbing) and css for hover (mouse), both being needed based upon how the user was navigating the page (tab or mouse). By using a parent div with CSS position:relative, nested subchild images were positioned on top of each other, using CSS position:absolute, and the focus/hover would toggle the display:none to display:block, and the reverse. Similar to how Zen theme and Atrium do it.

Firebug has a nice feature, the right pane top menu "Style" has a pulldown where the mouse focus for highlighting blocks can be changed between active or hover.

We applauded Mike off the stage, and gave a warm welcome to our host Scott, who had prepared an ad hoc presentation on Rules Module, something he used for his last web site. He showed how to code a rule to select the creation of a new content type, and when one it's field had the value of "honda", that would invoke several actions, not just one, selected from a long list of actions, over 50, maybe 100 actions. He amazed us by putting in conditionals using AND and OR, and assigned the user creating the node a new role, created a second node with predefined title and content. Rules is different from core's Trigger and Actions. It's better. Scott wrapped up with a brief mention of VBO, Views Bulk Operations could use Rules. For example, blocking an userid could result in all that userid's content becoming unpublished, automatically.

To conclude the night's presentation side, Jason talked about Sortable Grid Views Plugin, how it now had a drag and drop feature to assign the 'order' of a series of nodes presented on a page inside a Views' table mode. But it has no pagination.

To wrap up the evening, we moved to After Dark at Lucky Baldwin's, with a selection of 62 beers on tap that night, it can vary from 30 to 80, depending on what festival was most recent. The specialties are fish and chips, an excellent choice which I had, and pies (beef or chicken pies for you Americans), burgers and their french dip was the waitress Penny's choices for us.

Like all After Darks, the questions ranged the world, and half was on Drupal, and most everyone got answers or solution directions for their current web site they were working on. 3 hours of After Dark meeting. We had fun!

Hope to see more of you in Pasadena. (BTW, After Dark's are optional, as is buying any food or drink. Come for as long as you like and leave when you need to. Families are important, too. Right? ;^)

Pete