Hudson Valley Drupal Meetup -- November 10th

Hi Everyone,

I'm sorry to say I won't be able to attend tonight. I'm sick and contagious and you do NOT want what I have, so I'm staying away.

My check in: Thanks to your advice last time, I've been having great fun getting Drupal 7 going on Linode.

I'm looking forward to reading the notes of the meeting.

Peace,
Vonn

Here's the flowchart that I showed during the presentation. Again, not sure who did it, but it's awesome.

http://drupal.org/files/theme_flow_6_0.pdf

Jim gave a great overview of how themeing works in Drupal. He started off with the basics of how everything goes through the theme() function, refer to the very helpful flowchart posted above. The talk continued through basics of of hook_ functions and then went through creating a sub theme and creating a theme from scratch. Interesting points:

• devel_themer is a godsend when editing
• While Zen is a good starter theme, Basic is better
• Just because you have a block configured to not be visible on a particular node doesn't mean it isn't going to get rendered. Think about the performance hit of your blocks.
• Calls to CCK's content_format() function are interesting and should be considered

Cool and interesting modules brought up:

• Scrolling Titlebar Text - make the Browser's Title bar text to Scroll or Marquee
• meetup_events - synchronize events from a drupal instance to a meetup.com group
• Ultimate League Tool - a suite of custom modules used to simplify the day-to-day management and operations of amateur sport leagues
• Transliteration - Provides one-way string transliteration and cleans file names during upload by replacing unwanted characters....great way to handle file names with spaces

Miscellaneous conversation

• Responsive web design - while nobody in the group has implemented a responsive theme there was tremendous interest. bostonglobe.com was brought up as a great example. While the Omega theme certainly seems like a good fit peeople are looking for Drupal 6 options, maybe people should look at Fusion (while not directly supported just yet, people like alienresident have based their work on it, see http://groups.drupal.org/node/178609).
• <meta> tags - If interested in manipulating meta tags look into the module Nodewords.
• DrupalCampNYC10 is coming up. A couple of people are going and a couple more are interested. Hopefully we all enjoy the trip.

We'll meet again Thursday, December 8th. It will be a show and tell type of month so come willing to show off a website, give a lightning talk, or talk about a project you are working on.