drupal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I've been reading up on JavaScript and jQuery in Drupal in preparation for my upcoming Google Summer of Code project, so I thought I'd check out the JavaScript presentations at DCSF, starting with this one.

This is a simple introduction to attaching a simple JS file through the theme layer and using jQuery to mess around with things, going into jQuery UI at the end. Bevan also shows some good debug techniques in Firebug.

Here are some Drupal specific highlights for the readers.

Through the Lullabot podcasts, Jeff Eaton (and the other Lullabots) gave me my introduction to Drupal. I'm not sure how he packs his Drupal chatter with so much information and hilarity all at the same time, but the combination is definitely one of the things that got me hooked on Drupal. 

So reading quotes from this presentation as they popped up on Twitter is one of the things that made me most angry at the ash cloud. But it is now up online (!) thanks to the amazing DCSF organizers (double !).

Here are my notes. I've removed most of the funny (and got tired at the end), so you should really watch the real thing.

Override Drupal's default HTML output using templates. You can override individual fields and content types.

Video #8 in this Intro to Drupal 7 series.

This screencast gives an introduction to creating a subtheme of Zen and modifying it with CSS.

Video #7 in this Intro to Drupal series. 

Use views to create lists of content in Drupal 7. This screencast demonstrates creating a view that has multiple displays, using the whole node or just fields in the list, customizing the way fields are displayed, and changing the HTML formatting of the list using the user interface.

Video #6 in this Intro to Drupal series.