Drupal

The Drupalcon Chicago 2011 track chairs met for the first time last week. Our first task is to come up with track descriptions. For the first time, Theming is going to be separate track from Design and UX. While this shows a nice focus on these interrelated but distinct topics, I'm still trying to come up with a good description that helps define the dividing line between design and theming for sessions proposals like “Designing with CSS3”.

Anyway, here’s my first draft for my track’s description:

Theming Track

As Drupal’s mighty hands build markup, styling and dynamic behaviours, the lowly Newbs have forever strived to comprehend this Magic. With gnashing of teeth, wailing and despair often being their pitiful state. But, lo! Behold the mighty Drupalcon Theming Track. Forthwith, We, the Gods of Drupal, beseech the worthy to attend this track and despair no more.
[insert thunder crack here]

Hmm… I may have to tone it down. A bit.

Originally published on http://www.palantir.net/blog/better-know-module-menu-block-part-ii

Everyone knows the top-tier Drupal modules, but with over 5,000 modules available for Drupal it's no surprise that many useful ones go unnoticed. As a public service to the Drupal community, Palantir is working to raise awareness of some of these unsung heroes.

If you read my previous post about converting Subversion repositories to git, you’ll know that to do a proper Subversion-to-Git transformation on a batch of repositories is going to take some time (what with all that command line typing). I had 142 legacy project Subversion repositories lying around I wanted converted to Git and, since I’m lazy, I pulled on my bash boots and wrote me a script to do the work!

With the git-svn-migrate scripts I wrote, you can batch convert all of your Subversion repositories in just 3 steps. And I’ve GPLed them and put them on GitHub if you’d like to collaborate and improve them; see the git-svn-migrate project page.

When I first realized that I needed a version control system, the best system at the time was CVS. (No, really.) Subversion was nearing 1.0, so I waited for its release and then used it everywhere. Well, that was 2003. Time for a change.

This past year, it became obvious that there were many Git users within the Drupal community, so Drupal has decided to move to Git. Since then I've started learning and researching the best ways to convert all my development to a Git-based workflow. So far… it rocks.

So this post is going to be a big “duh” for anyone who has written a book covering an open source project, but it was a bit of a surprise for me…

As anyone who’s taken a look at the Zen project knows, I’ve written a lot of documentation for free. And I’m a big fan of (and a member of) Drupal’s documentation team. They rock! \m/

Originally published on http://www.palantir.net/blog/better-know-module-menu-block-part-i

Everyone knows the top-tier Drupal modules, but with over 5,000 modules available for Drupal it's no surprise that many useful ones go unnoticed. As a public service to the Drupal community, Palantir is working to raise awareness of some of these unsung heroes.

Back in the day, all the CSS of the sites I built were in a single file: style.css. Things were easy. I built the site; I organized my styles; I knew where everything was.

Of course, then I discovered the power of leveraging an open-source community. And now there are innumerable developers writing the CSS for my websites. To keep things manageable, each module of functionality has its own stylesheet.

Unfortunately, once you get in the habit of having multiple stylesheets for your website, you will eventually run into a weird problem with Internet Explorer: some of your styles won’t apply. At all.

And if you have sufficient Google-fu, you’ll eventually discover this is a little known bug: Internet Explorer will only load the first 31 stylesheets and will ignore the rest. And this isn’t even limited to our usual suspect, IE6. All versions of IE have this limitation.

The Full Problem
and why I was insane enough to load 993 stylesheets on one page

The two biggest things that have bothered me as maintainer of the Zen theme is:

1. People complaining about Zen being bloated
2. People actually using the Zen Classic sub-theme

With the latest release of Zen of I've tried to address both points. Zen 6.x-1.1 is now out and with it Zen has slimmed down… by jettisoning the Zen Classic sub-theme. :-)

Please rate and vote for my “I’m coming to DrupalCon Paris video avalanche” response. A free Drupalcon Paris ticket means more beer money. Daddy needs beer! So give me some lovin’, Drupal community!

Did I mention I rap about Drupal in the video? So go watch the “John Albin Wilkins” one and vote for me! :-D (See the detailed voting instructions below.)

Also, I’m behind in the polls right now! Help!

Ok, I mentioned this in twitter a few weeks ago, I created an issue about it in D7’s issue queue, and there are 2 small print notes in the D6 theme guide, but I don’t think my message was visible enough. So let me just say for the record (again)…

Never, never, ever, ever use phptemplate_ as the prefix for your theme’s preprocess functions. Don’t do it! phptemplate_ prefix should talk to the hand! Expunge it from your memory. It’s an ex-prefix. Seriously, cut it out! So, let me re-phrase:

Every time you use phptemplate_ prefix,
God adds a pointless issue to Drupal’s issue queue.
Please, think of the issue queue!