DISCUSSIONS

Adobe MAX 2009 conference in Los Angeles, California

Posted by Chris Charlton on August 26, 2009 at 4:13pm

Adobe's annual MAX conference is taking place this October 4-7th in Los Angeles, CA. I will be presenting three Drupal related sessions at this conference for Adobe. Most of my sessions show people how to customize Drupal 6 through themes, modules, and its administration. My sessions are 1-1.5hrs, with one session being a lab (BYOL: Bring Your Own Laptop Lab).

Adobe MAX is a paid conference, and has something like over 200 sessions. Early bird discount still available (as of this writing).

http://max.adobe.com

My sessions are:

Customizing Drupal Using Dreamweaver - skill: Beginner - Learn how to install Drupal, a robust, full-featured web content management system, and publish your first pages. You'll be guided through common designer workflows using Drupal and learn how to customize Drupal theme templates. When this lab is complete, you'll be able to take your new skills back to work and be more productive.
Exploring Web Content Management Systems from a Designer's Perspective - skill: Beginner - Watch an expert guide you through a selection of today's popular web content management systems and learn which one is right for you. This session will include detailed demonstrations of WordPress, Drupal, and the Adobe InContext Editing service in action, covering installation and publishing.
Learn to Rock Drupal Using Dreamweaver - skill: Beginner - Explore the functionality of Drupal from a designer's perspective while learning about the most common workflows. Learn how to integrate Drupal with Dreamweaver and how to use Creative Suite 4 Web Premium to customize Drupal theme templates.

I have presented at MAX before, and attended twice. This conference is huge. Last year 5,000 attendees ran around chatting Flash, Flex, AIR, Photoshop, After Effects, everything Adobe. One of the new things Adobe has done at MAX is run un-conferences inside the main conference building. Last year there were four un-conferences going on all week inside MAX, adding to the already hundreds of sessions. This year I am involved with the Web CMS theme of the conference, promoting Drupal & PHP. Some of you know my Drupal Dreamweaver extensions and Theme Starter desktop software, so I am glad to be exclusively covering Drupal in my talks this year. One session covers the different approaches in Web CMS software like Wordpress & Drupal. For that session I will be sharing the stage for that session with a Wordpress counterpart. I hope that session turns into a feature flinging match as it'll help me get caught up with Wordpress limitations.

I'd like to promote the MAX conference to the Drupal community, and at the same time ask who is already planning to attend. We can meet up and rep Drupal together.

DotNetNuke vs Drupal or Wordpress with Flutter

Posted by teresaocdesigner on August 20, 2009 at 8:14pm

Hi, I'm a designer and I design web sites and contract with programmers to
code them and recommend the best platform. I have a couple web sites being
built in DotNetNuke. I would like more information from a neutral party to
help me determine if it would be in the client’s best interest to
customize the functionality for the products and staff pages in DotNetNuke
or start over and build the site in Drupal or Wordpress with Flutter. There
are about 80 separate product pages and 40 staff pages. They need to cross
reference. The products pages need to be accessed by alphabetical order,

Camp/Conference formula for Drupal

Posted by Chris Charlton on August 10, 2009 at 7:23pm

With over 500 camp attendees and 60+ session proposals, us organizers of Drupal Camp LA needed a Drupal site that was built for organizers and attendees, with lessons learned from 3+ DrupalCons & 2+ DrupalCamps. Here is our formula for our awesome camp site.

"DrupalCampLA.com was built on Drupal 6 using core & contributed modules to handle event registration, sponsorship management, featured speakers, user bio's, and session proposals. The website features an attendee driven event schedule where members propose sessions and only registered members pick which sessions they'd like to see (in the BarCamp style). Planning the schedule for the day of events has been made flexible enough to allow organizers to maintain a master schedule with ease. Not to mention that all attendees get their own schedule view with the sessions they pick."

"The web site was based on the latest Drupal 6.x release and utilized many of the current generation modules such as CCK for content customization, imagefield and imagecache to handle imaging Views & custom theming built on Zen for content presentation." (A full list of the modules used is in the case study - http://drupal.org/node/519100 )

The download link is available in the case study post - http://drupal.org/node/519100 and has been made available by LA Drupal & This By Them.

New Adobe.com article: Building Drupal Zen sub-themes with Dreamweaver CS4

Posted by Chris Charlton on June 23, 2009 at 2:11pm

The third article in my Drupal series for Adobe.com is out now. This article covers Drupal Zen Sub-Themes, including Dreamweaver tip(s) when working with Drupal themes.

"When asked why I would recommend the Zen theme versus a core theme such as Garland, I answer, Zen was built to be a seed for your tree—you plant the seed, water it, and watch it grow! Garland looks nice, but is not documented well and has custom page template code that should not appear elsewhere. In short, Garland is just not right as the basis for a theme; the Zen theme is."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_zen_subthemes.html

DrupalCampLA 2009 Shirt Design Contest

Posted by Chris Charlton on June 19, 2009 at 10:41pm

Drupal Camp LA 2009 will be taking place from August 8-9th. Our annual two day event features training, sessions, an install fest, and networking opportunities with hundreds of Drupal users!

New this year is our DrupalCampLA 2009 Shirt Design Contest! You design a shirt and the winner will receive a printed shirt with their design or a Drupal book (provided by book sponsors). Each prize option valued over $25.00!

Rules: Entries must be submitted before Monday July 13, 2009. Designs can be in color. Multiple entries per person is allowed. Usage of the Drupal logo is not required, but helps. One or more of the following phrases should appear in your design(s):
* Drupal Camp LA
* 2009
* Los Angeles
* www.drupalcamp.com (or just drupalcamp.com)
* www.ladrupal.org (or just ladrupal.org)

Adobe.com Drupal article: Using Drupal themes with Dreamweaver CS4

Posted by Chris Charlton on June 10, 2009 at 9:13pm

The second article in my Drupal series for Adobe.com is out now. This article covers Drupal Themes, Dreamweaver tip(s) when working with Drupal, and shows off the Drupal Theme Starter desktop software.

"Understand the fundamentals of a Drupal theme and how Dreamweaver CS4 helps designers produce these themes."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_themes_with_dwcs...

<a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_themes_with_dwcs4.html

Running Cron Manually

Posted by shirleyto on June 3, 2009 at 9:40pm

Hi there,

I'm trying to run cron manually for the site search feature but it's giving me this error:

 Fatal error: Call to undefined function the_time() in <<site path>>includes/common.inc(1646) : eval()'d code on line 55

I took a look at common.inc and bootstrap.inc but I don't think what I'm looking for is in either of those files...? What should I look at?

Thanks.

-shirley

LA Drupal videos galore (DrupalCampLA + Meetings)

Posted by Chris Charlton on May 27, 2009 at 8:54pm

For over a year LA Drupal has been recording our meetings and many of our events. View the videos online... http://ladrupal.blip.tv

Subscribe to our video podcast... http://ladrupal.blip.tv/rss (available directly on iTunes too)

We provide these videos for free for people to learn Drupal of course. Over the next handful of weeks you will see us release videos from our meetings and DrupalCampLA '08. Learn the basics of Drupal, theme design, module development, advanced views, Services module (Flash + Drupal), and many, many more topics all relating to Drupal.

Adobe.com article: Building a Drupal site in 10 steps

Posted by Chris Charlton on May 12, 2009 at 6:18pm

I just saw my latest Drupal article is now published on Adobe.com, and this is the first in a series I have produced.

"Read on to see how you can set up a Drupal site in just 10 steps. Learn about adding content, altering menus, modules, and themes, and how to get your site ready for search engines and users."

Read the article now at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/drupal_site_in_10_steps...

Charset for Foreign Language

Posted by shirleyto on April 29, 2009 at 5:36pm

Hi,

I created a site with Italian content but some characters are showing up as question marks (please see attachment). I already changed the meta tag to but that doesn't help, the encoding is still UTF-8 and I need to manually change it to ISO-8859 in the browser's encoding setting for words to show up correctly. What am I doing wrong?

Appreciate any advice/hint/help. Thank you.