Drupal Camp LA 2008

Ok, so the camp has started.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jjemmett/DrupalCampLA08#

The keynote addresses were very well done. I took notes on paper, and I will transcribe them in here later.

First Presentation: jQuery and Drupal by Victor Kane
He spent a lot of time on the background of everything, but so far, no meat.

Tools that he is using: Firefox, and Firebug.

What I am understanding is that jQuery is currently a part of the core of Drupal, and we can interact with it via the console in Firebug.

Drupal uses a naming convention to do a type of polymorphism.

node-quote.tpl.php - adds the javascript to the page that is needed for the page, and it also templates the quote.

His website is http://awebfactory.com.ar/, and he will have his example code up on his blog.

That's all folks.


Second Presentation: Dreamweaver & Drupal 6 - XTND.US (Chris Charlton)
Dreamweaver is one of Chris's loves for the web.
  • It's a good IDE much like Eclipse.
  • It's a great tool.
  • Designers using Photoshop use it.
  • It's used by lots of people.

You are always learning CSS. Don't hold yourself back, stop using notepads and start using environments.

Always create two additional folders in their sites/ folder. Modules and Themes

His presentation is very Dreamweaver specific, however he's going over certain principles that are expandable for all users.

Introduction to: Drupal 5 Themer Kit Pro extension for Dreamweaver which he will be selling to get money for the Drupal Association.

Write down everything - "naming conventions rule"


Third Presentation: Theming with Zen (Mike Stewart)
Zen Fixed Width
Negative Margins. Make sure all your elements don't bother eachother.
Fourth Presentation: Introductory Theming & Understanding the Template System - (Michael Thorne)
http://drupal.org/project/devel
http://api.drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/node/209561
Fifth Presentation: Using CSS and JQuery to Manipulate Style and Markup: A Case Study of LAdrupal.org - (Helior Colorado)
Don't Modify, Override! Hacking the system breaks the community driven methodology of the project.

zen/subtheme/style.css and zen/subtheme/script.js are the default files that drupal looks for to override the more general objects and styles.

In order of importance in cascading style sheets:
  1. User !important flag will force an override of style
  2. Author !important
  3. Author styles
  4. User styles
  5. Browser styles
  1. Inline style=" "
  2. !important rule
  3. #id selector
  4. .class selector
  5. type selector
  6. * (universal) selector
Specificity Calculator - counter of how many times this is used (using an unspecified multiplyer. We are going to use multiples of 10 for an example)
  1. A(inline) X 1000
  2. B(id) X 100
  3. C(class) X 10
  4. D(type) x 1
  5. Position (last loaded) takes precidence if two have the same specificity
Example:
#main .block .nav li {
display:inline;
padding-left:5px;
} = 121
#page #main .block li{
display:block;
font-weight:800;
} = 211
  • item1
  • = 1000
    Case Study: ladrupal.org

    The website is owned by someone that can never be contacted.

    sets defaults first
    * {
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    }

    jQuery can be very helpful to modify the theme after the page is sent to the browser but before it is sent to the user.

    Add code to the script.js

    $(document).ready(function(){
    if(document.getElementByID("Secondary")){
    $("#primary").html($("#secondary").html());
    }

    google search visual jQuery -> remisharp will help in understanding how the jQuery API works.

    Meet and Greet: acquia is a corporate sponsor of Drupal much like Redhat is a corporate sponsor of Linux.