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  • Introducing SPARQL Views

    Submitted by Lin on Mon, 2010-07-12 23:05
    in

    As some of you know, I have been working on a Google Summer of Code project this summer. My aim is to make it easy for site administrators to pull data from RDF datasets into their sites and have that data actually contribute to the site, instead of just being a novelty.

  • Default theme implementations--Notes

    Submitted by Lin on Sun, 2010-05-09 18:09
    in

    I consider myself lucky to have started with Drupal in a job where I had to do a lot of custom theming. It helped me understand the importance of separation of concerns between the data manipulation and the actual display of the data. It also helped me grok the Presentation-Abstraction-Control stuff that everyone (or mostly Larry Garfield) talks about.

    I was hoping that this presentation would be a good resource for my colleagues at DERI, most of whom aren't too familiar with the theme layer. Unfortunately, I'm not sure whether module developers who haven't worked with the theme layer would understand how to make their output themable after watching this presentation... but I picked up some neat tips.

    Sidenote: The subtitle of this session was "a guide for module developers who want sweet love from Morten and JohnAlbin"... and you should strive for their sweet love.

  • Grok Drupal (7) Theming--Notes

    Submitted by Lin on Thu, 2010-05-06 09:41
    in

    Even though I have been theming for a while, I thought I would check out my Google Summer of Code mentor Laura Scott's presentation on Groking Drupal (7) Theming.

    It is a great introduction that really helps form a mental model for how the theming layer works. It would be great for some of the other researchers here at DERI who haven't yet grappled with the theme layer... really a must watch for anyone who is creating modules with HTML output who hasn't yet figured out the theme layer.

  • 20 APIs Every Drupal Developer Should Know--Notes

    Submitted by Lin on Thu, 2010-05-06 09:24
    in

    This session just went through 20 of the most used APIs in Drupal and described quicly what they can be used for. The presenter has also posted blog posts about some of these APIs in the month leading up to DrupalCon.

  • Databases: The Next Generation--Notes

    Submitted by Lin on Thu, 2010-05-06 05:32
    in

    One of the DrupalCon presentations that I wanted to be sure to watch early on was Databases: The Next Generation, presented by database maintainer and self described gadfly Larry Garfield.

    There have been some big changes in the Database Abstraction layer in Drupal 7, which I've been using in patches to core and porting a contib module or two to D7. I've already groked dynamic queries and why they are great from reading up on PDO, but since most of my database experience has been using Drupal 6, I still haven't quite figured out how transactions work even though they've been around in databases for a long time ....and I have no idea about how to make master/slave work.

    Even though, as Garfield says, everything in this presentation is covered in the docs at http://drupal.org/node/310069, this presentation is a great and worthwhile intro to the D7 db abstraction layer.