Drupal Planet

After months of site development, code, more code, and long hours, launch day arrives. A site launch can come as a relief, create a bittersweet moment, or one filled with pride and a sense of accomplishment, not unlike a parent sending a child off to their first day of kindergarten.

Right now everyone wants a good mobile experience for their site and that is sparking discussions about what theme you can and should use to make your site accessible to the mobile world. At Zivtech, we feel that we have outgrown starter themes because we spend more time overriding than using them (especially in D7 since a lot of the great Zen stuff is baked right in). The other day I got to thinking, just what would it take to build a responsive theme for Drupal from scratch. Is it so complicated that we need systems upon systems to handle it?

At DrupalCamp Austin I presented a new version of "From a contractor to a shop", which I've presented at a number of DrupalCons and DrupalCamps. Attached are the slides from the presentation, as well as a slideshare embed of the same.

Zivtech's Senior Developer, Howard Tyson, recently conducted a Node.js webinar with our Drupal partner, Acquia.

Join us in Portland, Oregon for the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit October 14 -16, 2011. Zivtech is sponsoring the event and many of our developers and designers have been selected to speak. Be sure to check-out their sessions (listed below) or view the full schedule here.

Getting it into Drupal with Migrate

Andrew Morton (drewish)
Track: Development and Code
Experience level: Intermediate/Advanced

Migrate module is a powerful tool for importing, transforming and syncing content from external sources into Drupal. The power comes from an object oriented API that's tricky to get started with. We'll walk through the various classes in the module and how they work together to manage migrations. Once you understand roles we'll plug some together and move some data around.

Sassy CSS: Compass Sass Susy

Meghan Palagyi (dead_arm)
Track: Design and Theming
Experience level: Beginner/Intermediate

CSS is necessary in order to specify how fonts, colors, images and layout properties look and act. You need CSS to make your site look "good", but why write plain CSS when you can write Sassy CSS? In a world of CSS3 and browser-specific implementations, writing standard CSS can get tedious. Meet the new CSS, Compass, Sass, and Susy. Sass and SCSS (Sassy CSS) are CSS syntaxes that will change your styling' life. Both compile to CSS, and both make writing CSS3 the best ever. Compass is a super-powered framework to save you time and works with both syntaxes. Behold the power of CSS3 mixins, CSS resets, typography shortcuts and helper functions in a single line! The final pièce de résistance is Susy, a flexible grid option for people who like grids, including flexible responsive and adaptive options. Introduce yourself to these three Ruby gems and never write vanilla CSS again.(http://sass-lang.com, http://compass-style.org, http://susy.oddbird.net)

Calendaring with Drupal

Tim Plunkett (tim.plunkett)
Track: Development and Code
Experience level: Intermediate

Most people visualize events in a daily, weekly, or monthly calendar format, so using Drupal to create and manage calendars is a desirable feature for many sites. Since Drupal 4.7, the Calendar module has handled this need, but for Drupal 6 and 7, there is an alternative, the FullCalendar module. Calendar and FullCalendar are both built around the Views module, but their different use cases makes picking the right one for your project an important decision.
Learn more about the options and features of both modules, and discuss their flexibility, performance, and stability.

LEMON- Drupal diseases and cures

Jody Hamilton (Jody Lynn)
Track: Information Architecture and Administration
Experience level: Beginner Intermediate Advanced

With the great demand for complex Drupal websites exceeding the supply of experienced developers and with the barrier of entry to building websites low, badly botched Drupal builds are common. Some lemons are more expensive to fix than to rebuild from scratch, yet website rescue jobs are still on the rise. In my work I often take-on rescue jobs and get to see a nice cross-section of the worst 'professional' sites. In this session I'll answer:

• What is a Drupal lemon? What are the common varietals?
• How can some websites work perfectly well but still be a complete disaster?
• What are some tell-tale signs in the diagnosis?
• How can you ensure you don't get (or build) a lemon?
• When is a website beyond repair?
• What happens in a typical lemon rescue? What are some of the technical techniques used to rescue a lemon?

This session is appropriate to all levels of Drupal builders, developers, evaluators, and project managers.

View the complete schedule here.