2011-08-25 North County Drupal User Group meetup

Posted by senpai on August 19, 2011 at 9:37pm

Start:

2011-08-25 19:00 - 21:00 America/Los_Angeles

Organizers:

senpai

redhatmatt

steveoliver

Event type:

User group meeting

August's North County San Diego Drupal group meetup will be on Thursday the 25th from 7-9pm. Please join us, it's free and you're guaranteed to learn something cool or your money back!

Our very own Matt Young (redhatmatt) won't be here this week because of the DrupalCon London 2011 conference which took most of our Transparatech people away (Shane Yakely and Sam Boyer are there too) but Joel Farris (Senpai) is still here in S.D.! He and Steve Oliver will lead the monthly meetup, but what should the topic be?

TOPICS
What do you want to discuss or share? Comments please!. We could talk about theming? Does anybody want a breakdown of Drupal's theming basics?

SIGN UP IN ADVANCE
Please sign up for this event if you know you'll be attending so that we can get a head count. Thanks, and see you there!

Comments

Trekking down from San Clemente :)

Posted by philosurfer on August 19, 2011 at 10:32pm

Look forward to meeting North County drops!

          "we are the cult of personality."

Not going to make it!? just

Posted by philosurfer on August 25, 2011 at 10:47pm

Not going to make it!?

just got hit with a big project that needs completion before next sunrise..... grrrrr.......

Next month.. .I will be there.

          "we are the cult of personality."

Finally gonna make it to a meetup

Posted by jeffdufour on August 23, 2011 at 2:08pm

Think I'm gonna finally make it to the monthly meetup.

Looking forward to meeting more experienced Drupal folks.
Hope to make some connections and learn a bit.

Work on Camp Pendleton and live in Fallbrook/Rainbow.

See you there!

8-25 meeting

Posted by snightwing on August 24, 2011 at 4:26am

Hi All,
looks like this Thursday's meeting is going to be slim.
I'll regroup with everyone next month.

Thanks.

Shadow!

Theming sounds good

Posted by Larry Jones on August 24, 2011 at 4:22pm

Sorry to be late to signup; looking forward to the meeting. I'm guessing several will show up without signing up.

Theming is both easy and hard. It's easy to add a theme, select it, click a few buttons to configure what are available for that particular theme. Among my challenges, some I figured out:

Which theme? Don't overlook the default theme. D7's Bartik is better than many contributed themes. It is configurable, and I imagine once I get CSS under control it could be quite nice. Zen is most popular, but that may be due to legacy, people continuing to re-use Zen or subthemes long after better ones came available. Fusion and AT are popular base themes. Criteria for recommending base themes seems subjective, sometimes based on coding style.
Which subtheme? Easy Breeze (on base theme Zen) and Pixture Reloaded (on Adaptive Theme) both look good to me as starting points, but don't trust my judgment. What do you like? Why?
How to tweak? Pixture Reloaded has good controls. Others have more layout choices, if that matters.
What's good design, anyway? DrupalCampLA brought into sharper focus the distinction between web site developer and designer. I'm hardly either, but my artistic design sensibilities are dubious. Given that, how to choose a design?
Tweaking. Firebug add-on to Firefox is a necessary tool for finding the css code that controls a design attribute, and for testing changes. What to do with that seems to depend on the particular theme and subtheme. Do the changes go in custom.css inside the subtheme? Sometimes... When do changes done in css files interfere with changes through the Admin interface (Appearance | Settings for the particular subtheme). So many choices. Work flow is unclear.
Drush. If css or other files are tweaked in a subtheme, what does "drush up" replace or wreck, or is it always safe? And while we're at it, have you used drush up on a production site? Awfully tempting, bet you have.

Enough for now. See you Thursday?

Also, MAMP 2 & drush revisited

Posted by Larry Jones on August 24, 2011 at 4:30pm

Any of you catch the recent half price sale on MAMP Pro? I did ($29) and fell in that ditch for a while. Seems MAMP Pro (or is it 2.0 that did it?) relies on /Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP Pro/db/ rather than /Applications/MAMP/db/ . That was a big wtf for me. Lost more than a day.

Still stuck getting drush to behave again in localhost. Something changed in which php.ini is used (or where) when shifting to MAMP Pro 2. grumble grumble.

But MAMP Pro seems to be worth the trouble. Configuration, switching between sites, ssl setup, various things seem easier. If I can ever get the details straight.

Maybe worth a few minutes to swap stories on local setups.

Theming, Module Output

Posted by steveoliver on August 25, 2011 at 12:25am

I like the idea of Senpai dropping some Theming knowledge. I'm getting started with the theming of D7 module output, so if we want to discuss the "back-end" side of theming, I'll be prepared to share what I've learned so far.

So far, I've come to love the custom node view modes that can be defined in D7.

Steve Oliver