himerus's blog

Creating Omega Sub Themes - Revised Demo

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Posted by himerus
2010-06-29 11:27

The screencast above demonstrates the proper methods of creating a subtheme of the Omega base theme in Drupal. My previous demonstration is outdated as it used the command line method, which has been replaced with a Drush command.

This method was demonstrated at Drupal Design Camp Boston - 2010 in my presentation on Elevating 960gs in Drupal (7) with the Omega Theme.

Screencast Summary

Creating subtheme via the file manager
Creating subtheme using Drush command provided by the Omega Tools module

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Omega Theme - Drupal 7 Demo

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Posted by himerus
2010-06-08 12:58

Screencast Summary:

Recently, a LOT of work has gone in the the Omega base theme for Drupal 7.

The theme has gone through 9 Alpha releases in the past few weeks, and is now at a very stable first Beta release packed with new features, and with all the major bugs ironed out, and all features tested extensively.

The above screencast demonstrates the features that were available in Drupal 6, and the new features in the Drupal 7 version. The entire demonstration is in a live Drupal 7 environment.

Many new features will have to be backported to the Drupal 6 version of Omega, and i am open for someone to help co-maintain the code base for the Omega theme for Drupal 6. If you are interested, please contact me with information including your drupal.org username/id.

More Information:

Omega Project Page: http://bit.ly/omega-theme
Omega Tools Project Page: http://bit.ly/omega-tools
Omega Handbook: http://bit.ly/omega-handbook

Features Demonstrated:

Default grid sizing options
Default theme options
Content layout configurations
Grid overlay/debugging tool
Export and revert of theme settings provided by the Omega Tools module
Placeholder/debugging blocks provided by the Omega Tools module

Upcoming Presentations on Omega theme:

Drupal Design Camp Boston 2010 - Saturday, June 19th, MIT Stata Center, Cambridge, MA
DrupalCon Copengagen - August 23rd-27th, Copenhagen, Denmark

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Screencasting with Camtasia Studio by Techsmith

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Posted by himerus
2010-05-08 15:41

This short screencast demonstrates my normal usage of Camtasia Studio by Techsmith. I use Camtasia for creating screencasts for various demonstrations, and really love it's ease of use and flexibility.

I apologize in advance, this screencast is a bit spotty as I was using Camtasia for Mac to record the screencast of me using Camtasia Studio 7 in a Windows 7 virtual machine powered by Paralells.

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DrupalCampNH - Saturday May 22nd - Beginner Drupal Training

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Posted by himerus
2010-04-30 13:00

Coming May, 22nd 2010, New Hampshire will be hosting its first DrupalCamp. This camp will not be of the traditional session voting or barcamp style. The New Hampshire camp will be focused on a structured lineup of sessions that will help guide users with little or no knowledge of Drupal. This has been designed to be more of a training seminar for Drupal rather than a traditional camp. There is a large need for this type of camp in our area as we have a lot of users discovering Drupal, and this camp is intended to help with that adoption in our area, showing these new adopters of Drupal some of the basics to get them on their way to Drupal rockstardom!

From Drupalcampnh.org:

This first DrupalCamp in NH has been structured to be a training day for new drupalers, and those interested in learning about Drupal. Our goal is to provide valuable information for those users, and help grow the New Hampshire Drupal community by making it more accessible to users with new and varied interest.

Structured sessions will provide a start to finish overview of everything you should know when putting together a Drupal site from scratch. Topics include setting up infrastructure, Drupal Basics, CCK (Content types), Views and other important contributed modules, along with theming to round off the training.

This camp is going to be a great example for new users to demonstrate the passion of the Drupal community, and get those new users on their way to making amazing sites with Drupal!!

Be sure to head over now to Drupalcampnh.org, and reserve one of the last few tickets!!! And when you see us at the event, be sure to give a big thanks to Michelle (Developed by Miche) for all the time organizing this event, and pulling it off!!

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Creating Omega Sub Themes - Demo

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Posted by himerus
2010-04-27 19:10

Please visit the latest version of the screencast: Creating Omega Sub Themes - Revised Demo

This short screencast will demonstrate creating an Omega sub theme for your site.

The process is quite simple, and can be done in under a minute for anyone that has created sub themes before. This will however, go from the basics of copying the starterkit directory, and the edits you will need to make, and then further configuring your new sub-theme in the configuration options in the .info file.

Please forgive any spotty points in the video, this was my first screencast on the new macbook pro, so I need to iron out some issues there moving forward!

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Granite State of Mind

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Posted by himerus
2010-04-03 10:30

If this doesn't make you want to live in New Hampshire, I don't know what will!!

I love the Jay-Z version, but I feel a little sketch bumping that down the road with my windows down in Red Sox territory. This song makes it all better!

The news says this guy is blown up already, going on the Today show, and with the quality of this production will have a nice ride from this awesome video!!! You've got to see this if you no live, or ever have in New Hampshire!!

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Preparing for Drupalcon San Fransisco...

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Posted by himerus
2010-03-07 11:41

Freelance Consulting & Work in General

Well, 2010 is here, and so is March, and my blog has been pretty quiet for a while because of an insane amount of contract work that has left me with minimal time for anything outside of paid work. Drupal freelance has been VERY good to me over the last 4 months since leaving my full time employment. It was no doubt a very scary situation to be in again, but everything worked out for the best. Even the FT job that I ended up not getting that I was completely sure I wanted ended up falling apart for a reason.

Freelance Consulting/Contract work is a touchy business, and not for everyone, but for me, it really is a great way to be. What mainly attracts me to it is the ability to work from home, set my own hours, and oddly enough, make a lot more money than most full time opportunities. My days of commuting to ANY office are in the past, and while I will/am still considering FT positions that allow 100% telecommute, there's no reason for me to ever want to get out of my jammies and deal with office drama again.

Drupalcon San Fransisco

Enough of that catching up business, I wanted to talk Drupalcon! This spring, Drupalcon is in San Fran, and is going to be the largest Drupalcon ever. With already over 1500 registered attendees, this will be larger than the Drupalcon last year in Washington D.C., and is sure to probably surpass 2K atendees before the event actually gets here next month.

Drupalcon Paris was my first ever Drupalcon to actually be able to attend, and after an amazing experience there, including getting to present on the 960.gs/ninesixty theme, I knew that it would take a lot to keep me from going to each and every one after Paris.

The 2010 Agenda

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Posted by himerus
2009-12-31 11:27

personal

Well, it's come quite fast, but here is the new year & new decade just a short while away. This past year has been a crazy whirlwind for me personally and professionaly, and 2010 promises to likely continue down that same path.

2009 was a "ramping up period"

Of course I moved from my long time home in Colorado during 2009, and made my way to New England for a job that later didn't work out, but provided me 6 months of stability in a new location, a great group of new friends & associates, and a lot of great memories. 2009 also really changed both my dedication and immersion into the Drupal community. I attended D4D back in June in Boston, made it to Drupalcon Paris in September for my first Drupalcon event, and Drupalcamp Montreal following that up. I now regularly attend the Boston Drupal Users Group, and still skirt around the New Hampshire group, and always end up missing them for some reason!

2009 also ended for me as a freelancer/contractor again, and that has been the most rewarding change of all. It has brought me back to the life I enjoy leading, to being my own boss, making my own schedule, choosing what I want to work on or not, and most importantly not having to deal with higher ups that are complete douche-waffles. This last spurt of freelance work again has really reaffirmed why I worked freelance for so much of my professional career.

Overriding Field Handlers in Views with your own custom handler

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Posted by himerus
2009-12-16 18:40

The Problem

Today I ran across an issue when trying to format out some Views that were integrated with Organic Groups. I needed to format out a few things, and the one I will speak on and demonstrate here is pulling out the member count in an Organic Group. By default, when you pull that data out in a view, it creates a link to the default OG page for members inside a group. The default path for that page is: og/users/$nid/faces. I find that link horrible, ugly, and just pure nasty in a nutshell. I really don't want anything in a client facing path that references a module name or abbreviation in the path. Of course, you could use a custom path to overwrite those path(s), but that's only if you really want to also use the default view that OG provides for members.

In the project I'm working on, these links that I'm modifying point to a custom panels page with multiple views inserted that relate to the members of the group. This gives me a flexible usage so that any time the member count of the group is pulled & displayed using views, that it will render the way I want, and link where I want the user to go.

In that handler function provided by OG it's also only wrapping a link around the numeric value of the member count, but what I need is more text available to that linking the full text like 24 members.

The project I'm working on has some unique requirements in the wireframes & designs related to the groups, and so some custom work was needed. This walkthrough will show a setup in a custom module that overwrites the default field handler that views uses to render that field.

Provide an alternate image location for Service Links in your Drupal theme

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Posted by himerus
2009-12-08 10:24

I've wondered in the past when using the Service Links module for Drupal how to quickly change the images that are provided by the module. There can be multiple ways to accomplish this, but only one real way to provide new images without "hacking" the service links module. I've come across several posts that mention adding images to the images folder in the service links module, which I consider bad practice. There may be some changes in the 2.x branch of service links that make this a bit easier, but there are really two ways to "properly" do this in Drupal 6 with the 1.x branch of Service Links.

Option 1 - Overwrite the images in the service links folder

Don't do this. Kittens everywhere will be screaming in pain, and if you update your module, the images would be overwritten at a later date.

Option 2 - Declare new service links using hook_service_links()

Right off the bat, I'll let you know this is NOT the option I chose to use in my theme, but it is still a valid option. Using hook_service_links() you can declare "new" service links, and declare your image in the hook on each item. Doing it this way would require you using a custom module in order to declare the new service links, which in this case would be a copy of the ones you'd like to use, along with defining an image.

function YOURMODULE_service_links() {

  $links = array();

  $links['stumbleupon'] = array (

    'name' => 'StumbleUpon',

    'description' => t('Thumb this up at StumbleUpon'),

    'link' => 'http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=<encoded-url>&title=<encoded-title>',

    'icon' => drupal_get_path('module', 'YOURMODULE') . '/images/stumbleit.png',

  );

}

Jake Strawn | himerus