Central Florida Meetup Writeup - Saturday, April 19th, 2010

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DamienMcKenna's picture

We had a small attendance due to so many locals attending Drupalcon (lucky sods!), so rather than doing organized presentations we had some Q&A time.

Hewie showed his first Drupal site: seminolemastergardenershow.org

Some of the issues Hewie had dealt with the site's CSS. After I explained how to identify different objects on a page using either an ID or a class, and how elements could be stacked to more narrowly define the stylesheet, Anne helped identify the best way to specify a the object path for a particular view on a page so that he could something like the following:

div.view-exhibitor-list tr.odd {
  background:none repeat scroll 0 0 #F2F7EC;
  border:3px solid #CFCFCF;
}
div.view-exhibitor-list tr.even {
  background:none repeat scroll 0 0 #FFFFFF;
  border:3px solid #CFCFCF;
}

td.views-field-field-speaker-photo-fid {
  vertical-align: top;
}

Another issue Hewie had was building pulldown menus. I explained how different themes handled it differently, that although Drupal's built-in menu system allows for menu hierarchies, many themes did not provide a way of doing out of the box. Gaelen suggested using the module Nice Menus to build them in a very simple way and showed a few examples he had previously built.

We then took some time to discuss image galleries with Gaelen showing a site he had built for the UCF chapter of the IEEE organization. There are generally two different ways of doing it:

  • A content type with an imagefield that is set to allow multiple items
  • One content type for storing a single image per node, and then another content type with an image reference to link to the galleries.

The specific method used should be based on the specific needs for your site, e.g.:

  • Do you want to reuse the photos later or only ever put them in one gallery?
  • Do you want to build e.g. a separate gallery listing the "favorite photos of the year", etc?

Some modules that can help with this include:

  • Backreference would work when you have a node reference on the photo saying which gallery(ies) it is tied to and a node reference on the gallery saying which photos are included as it automatically builds the corresponding reference when one is created.
  • NodeReference Explorer provides a full pop-up interface to search for nodes within your site to add to a node reference field.
  • Image FUpload
  • works with a Flash file to give a way to do multi-file uploads more quickly than normal.

Gaelan was also having problems with Image_FUpload on one particular site he built while it worked fine on another site. When the problem was not identifiable as a browser issue, after a little more research he identified it as a compatibility problem between Image FUpload and the Seven admin theme (backported ported from Drupal 7) that he was using on this new site.

Along with these the discussion went into more advanced ways of using node references, including providing a way to automatically create nodes that don't already exist:

  • Node Reference Create lets you automatically create a new node when you type in a name for a node that doesn't already exist. I explained how I used it with BackReference to quickly build a structure of data for a movie review portion of my site, creating links between movies, directors and actors.
  • AddNode - one of several ways to add a popup to add a new node.
  • Add 'n Reference - one of several ways to add a popup to add a new node.
  • AutoNode - one of several ways to add a popup to add a new node.

Regarding the last three modules, it was suggested to read over the project pages for each module to see how each one worked to decide which would best suite a specific site's needs.

The final discussion revolved around exporting parts of your site to code, e.g. Views, content types, etc, the specific use case being in case the site gets obliterated by database corruption. I suggested starting off by finding anything that has an "Export" option within the admin UI and saving that as a file somewhere so at least it is readily available. A step beyond that is getting everything into a module and I offered a blog post I had written on exporting Views as starting point. It was also mentioned to always install the Backup Migrate and Backup Migrate Files modules to ensure you always have regular backups built.

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