For Drupalers in Western Montana, here's your chance to come out of the woodwork, gather, share what you know, and have fun with other Big Sky Drupal fans.
This is your group! Please join, start discussions, make friends, and use this group to learn and share what you know.
The new drupal.org site is live! What do you think?
This is very exciting: the redesigned drupal.org site launched yesterday. Drupal.org was long overdue for a redesign and reorganization. I've been using the site for over 5 1/2 years, and although it had seen several technical upgrades during that time, it had not received either a visual redesign or a fundamental reorganization of the information architecture.
The new drupal.org has both a new fresh look and totally reorganized navigation and search, as well as many new features. It should make it much easier for beginners and experienced community members alike to find what they need, get help, and see what's happening with Drupal development.
If you don't already have an account on drupal.org, now would be a great time to register (it's free).
I'm just getting used to the new design and features (5 1/2 years is a long time!) but so far I'm really impressed with the design and usability of the new site.
The site was over 2 years in design, planning, and development, and professional designers, IA, UX people were hired to help. You can see how much work and planning went into the process: http://bit.ly/ci2aIz
What do you think of the new drupal.org?
Read more
October Missoula Meetup: Getting Started with Drupal Part 6 – Photo Galleries and Slideshows
On Thursday October 21 we branch out from our monthly 'Getting Started with Drupal Series'. This month we'll cover Photo Galleries and Slideshows.
This is an often-discussed topic in Drupal, and we've seen a lot of interest here in our group in the last few months.
Read more
jQuery Plugin Integration
Hey all!
This may be extending Chris's previous question regarding slideshows, but may take it more in the javascript direction. I too have been looking for a way to create some unique slideshows, with a few certain requirements.
Read moreFirst Tuesday Meeting - Pending...
Hey all. Both Andy and I will be out of town this Tuesday, October 5 so we will be unable to organize/lead a meeting. I'd encourage the group so self-organize an informal meeting, perhaps at a coffee shop, for chatting and collaboration.
Use this thread to begin organizing a meeting, if desired, and I will post an Event node to the group, if needed.
Thanks to everyone for your participation in this group! You guys rock.
Best,
Scott
Hello from Bozeman
I am just getting started with Drupal to aid my interests in web development. I am majoring in computer science at Montana State University and am on my own as far as learning web development is concerned. I really wish they offered classes in JavaScript and PHP ect. If Drupal and its community are as powerful as I've been led to believe, I'm sure there's a possibility to gain more followers from the CS department. I'm following drupalmontana on twitter and am watching the #drupal-support channel on irc.freenode.net.
Read more
Photo gallery slideshow delivery method-Best practices.
In my endeavor to convert a photo slideshow from one site to another I ran into a dilemma.
What is the best practice for slideshow delivery?
I ask this because it was drilled into us (students) about being web tidy, best practices, contributing to make the web and servers as green as possible. Not to mention shooting for an ultra-light site for fast delivery and higher possible rankings on search engines.
The two contenders (maybe more?) are:
1) Using one or more of the modules in Drupal (which is best, fastest and easiest to implement and for client side updating)?
OR
Read moreOur Group is now on Twitter!
Our group now has an official Twitter feed!
http://twitter.com/drupalmontana or follow @drupalmontana
We'll be using this account for meeting announcements and items we deem of general interest to the Montana Drupal community, so please follow!
Read moreStrange code auto-inserted in the FCKeditor.
Last night Andy Laken was graciously helping me with some brain lock-ups I was encountering on my Drupal site build. During the course of his explanations he discovered one of the issues I had a note to ask about.
I have FCKeditor installed as the WYSIWYG editor for the site. I noticed strange little boxes always being added to the bottom of each text field and that happened each time I opened and edited a Page or a Story, didn't matter. The little squares (in the WYSIWYG mode) looked like the kind of squares one sees when an imgae didn't load in the older browsers.
Read moreIntroduction to Views
Here are some (hopefully helpful) notes from the Introduction to Views meeting. I've tried to cover some of the basic points from my presentation here for your convenience. Please feel free to continue the discussion below. I always prefer to answer questions about troubles you may run into on these public forums with the hope that it will help others learn.
Read moreDrupal fun – download infographic PDFs for print, t-shirt
My Slovakian colleague Jozef Toth of Mogdesign created these awesome Drupal infographics, thought I would share them with the group:
http://mogdesign.eu/blog/free-drupal-infographics-pdf-t-shirt/
Read moreDuplicating Main Navigation menus-links in a site sidebar block
I ran into a cool function on a site [ http://www.allenacademy.org/ ] that when the user selects a Main Navigation (Main Menu?) link, the entire link and all it's children, were replicated in Sidebar 1 for that series of pages.
Read moreSeptember Missoula Meetup: Getting Started with Drupal Part 5 – Introduction to Views
On Thursday September 16th we continue our monthly 'Getting Started with Drupal Series'. This month we'll cover the other 'must-have' add-in module: Views.
If websites are all about content, the Views module is about presenting that content to your site's visitors.
Views, like CCK, is a must-have for nearly any Drupal site — if you are serious about building a site with Drupal you do not want to miss this class!
What we'll cover in this class
- Getting Views and installing it on your site
- An orientation to the Views admin interface
- Understanding Displays and Output Styles
- Placing Views on your site
- Brief mention of Views add-on modules (depending on time)
Drupal SEO alert - issue with Meta Tags (nodewords) module and robots option
Since several people in our group are interested in SEO they may be running the Drupal Meta Tags module (http://drupal.org/project/nodewords). Apparently there is an issue in the module where, if certain config options are set, it will completely exclude your site from Google! Here's what my colleague Owen Barton just sent out about this:
Read more
Tuesday Drupal Meetup
This evenings discussion by Acquia's Josh Brauer was very good. I learned so much from everyone. I have been doing somethings the hard way. I did not know that fusion existed. Thanks
Read moreAllen Academy
At the Western Montana Drupal Group meeting this week, I briefly introduced my latest commercial Drupal website.
Allen Academy is a small college preparatory academy located in Bryan, TX. The website is located at www.allenacademy.org.
The site is built in Drupal 6 with a number of contributed modules. I'd be happy to have you take a look, and I'm definitely interested in any feedback you may have to offer about the site.
Read moreSep Missoula Drupal Meetup - Special guest Acquia's Josh Brauer
Welcome to Autumn, Drupalistas! (At least it feels that way, what happened to warm?) To welcome us back from the Labor Day weekend we have a special treat in store for September's Tuesday evening meetup: Josh Brauer — expert Drupaller and engineer at Acquia — will be on hand to share some of his Drupal expertise and passion. I asked Josh if there was anything we wanted to present on, and he replied:
I can pretty much talk about anything of interest... I've recently been talking on dev->stage->production workflows drupal gardens doing design in the browser (css/html instead of Photoshop comps ... or any other number of things ... what would be most interesting to your group?
Since this is a self-organizing group, I'm going to let all of us decide what we'd like to hear Josh present on. In addition to the topics above, you can get a sense of Josh's expertise and past presentations here:
- At the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in 2009, Josh presented on Connecting Drupal with Social Media: http://joshuabrauer.com/2009/10/connect-drupal-sites-social-media
- Josh co-presented 'getting started with Drupal(con)' in San Francisco this April: http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/getting-started-drupalcon
- Josh's Drupal blog: http://joshuabrauer.com/drupal
Please check those out, and use the comments here to say what you'd like to hear from Josh.
This is a special opportunity to hear from a Drupal expert here in Missoula. Hope to see you there!
Rough agenda
6:00 – arrive, chat, mingle
6:30 – presentation by Josh
7:30 – Q & A, informal discussion
8:30 – wrap-up, head home or for dinner/drinks
Meetup Details
6:00pm to 8:45 pm
Missoula Public Library
Large Meeting Room (downstairs)
301 East Main St.
Missoula MT 59802-4799
(406) 721-2665
map
Setting up a DEV site with same name as live site-same server? For newbies (like me!)
Ran into issue of client having a live site (in HTML) and we are building our first Drupal site using the same name. So how does one pull that off without having to use a strange site name for the Dev site, then having to rewrite all the page titles when it's time to set the Dev site to 'Go Live' ?
Long story short: Found out we could name the site the same but the Dev site name is off by a few letters plus it is indicated by dev(DOT) parentsitename.com/puppydogs/
Okay we started with the live site name: puppydogs(DOT)com
Read moreClean URL's on a sub domain and one-off's
I had a very interesting learning experience regarding Clean URL's and a subdomain. Try as I could I just could not get Drupal 6-X to pass the clean URL test. After much Googling and very little SERP's on the subject I finally found (or was shown) what the answer could be to fix this vexing problem.
Read moreSeeking website guru
If you have some time and are interested in using your drupal skills/expertise to help make our website (http://wmtahec.org/) look fabulous please contact Ilsa Seib at ilsa.seib@umontana.edu or 406.243.4746.
Thanks much!!
Read moreMT Programmers Summer BBQ
This month's third Thursday meeting will be replaced by the Montana Programmers Summer BBQ.
The Montana Programmers will be holding a BBQ for members and their families on Thursday, August 19 from 5:00-8:00pm in Kiwanis Park in Missoula and you are all invited. Please RSVP at the original Meetup.com post so they have an accurate count of attendees. If you've not already registered yourself as a member of that Meetup group, I'd encourage you to do so.
Read more