centre{source}
INTERACTIVE AGENCY
DrupalCon 2008: Popular Science Magazine Case Study
The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.
I attended this session and left it feeling very inspired. It was amazing to see what this small crew did with such a behemoth of a site. Just the thought of having to migrate a 1.66GB Oracle DB into a Drupal site makes me sweat. All things considered, I felt like this was probably the best session I attended at DrupalCon 2008. It wasn’t the nerdiest, or the geekiest, and it didn’t have lots of slides of code…but for our line of work, it was incredibly valuable. Not only did they go into the “nuts-n-bolts” of how they built the site, they also touched on the project management side, and also managing client expectations with such a large project.
Panels 2 Context Screencast
Jeff Miccollis and Young Hahn with DevelopmentSeed gave an excellent presentation at DrupalCon 2008 titled: Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Apps: taking advantage of core hooks and context. The primary focus of this session was explaining the various methods of maintaining “context” throughout a Drupal site. In layman’s terms, this simply means a method of determining what content to display, or what actions to take based on where the user is currently located on the site. A simple example given was multi-lingual sites. A site may be in English by default, but if the user switches the site’s language to Spanish, then the there has to be some method in place to remember that this is the language this user has chosen, and we can assume that the user wishes to view the rest of the site in whatever language they have chosen. The language the user selected has become the “context” for the site. Now, any page that the user navigates to will be in Spanish, because the site has been implemented in a such a way as to remember the user’s chosen language.
More DrupalCon Slides!
Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.
Woot!
John VanDyk - DrupalCon 2008 Triggers and Actions and Hooks, Oh My!
John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal’s founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5’s Actions module. There is also word of backporting Triggers to Drupal 5!
If you missed the Boston DrupalCon 2008, don’t miss out on this wonderful session.
Files can be downloaded here…
DrupalCon Boston 2008 - Session One: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Session: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Time: 9:00am (EST) 03/03/2008 Presenter: Chad Williams (hunmonk)
This presentation was targeted primarily at the Drupal newbie, and was mostly a “tips & tricks” session. Here are my notes from the session:
Memorial Day goodies
Just in time for the BBQ’s, fireworks, and swimming- here’s a list of ten links that I gathered up with a little something for everyone. Enjoy.
Cross-Browser Normalization
If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.
The Niftiest of Corners
Nifty Corners Cube is a javascript library written by Alessandro Fulciniti that enables you to easily implement rounded corners on your page. There are many different utilities out there on the web that do basically the same thing, but you’ll be hard pressed to find one that does it any easier.
If you have ever attempted to implement rounded corners in your markup and css, you’ll find that your markup quickly becomes riddled with presentational divs, loads of images, and the css seems to be playing the role of a bar bouncer. It’s even worse if the content box you have rounded needs to be fluid in any direction.
CSS Cross-Browser Tricks
Anyone that has written HTML and CSS has undoubtedly, at one time or another, faced a major headache attempting to acheive crossbrowser display uniformity. It’s a problem that’s not going to go away anytime soon, so we all just have to live with it for the time being.
I’ve noticed over the years, that everyone has a different approach to tackling this issue. Some prefer to use multiple stylesheets, one always for IE, the other for everyone else. Some code one stylesheet, but forsake uniformity for subtle, sometimes unnoticable, differences. I myself have used both of these techniques in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with either method; the end goal is to have a webpage that looks roughly the same in all the major browsers (IE 5-6, Firefox, Opera, Safari), and most importantly, without using tables for layout.
Virtuemart vs. osCommerce — first glance
Installation
Virtuemart:
- <5 minutes (if you have a working installation of Joomla, <10 minutes otherwise).
- Installs as a module for Joomla. Click upload & install from module installer pane, and viola!
- Package comes with two Joomla components, two mambots, and several plug-in modules that offer added functionality (i.e. minicart, top 10 products list).
- Includes sample data for a demo store.
- Uses Joomla’s admin interface for store administration
osCommerce:
- <10 minutes.
- Includes sample data for a demo store.
- Comes with admin interface.