Site Building

I will be demonstrating how to use VirtualBox to set up a local development environment on your workstation. You can use my prebuilt .ova file with CentOS 6, Drupal 7, Drush, Git, PHP 5.3 and MySQL.

Having tried, M/W/Xamp, Vagrant, and about a dozen others, this simple setup (which is very close to my production environment) has proven to be the most flexible and performant option.

Please install VirtualBox and the VM file before coming to the session to save time and bandwidth. I will bring a few USB keys with the VM file.

Note that the installers are about 100 Mb and the VM about 600 Mb, so it will be really helpful if you download them before you get to UCI. It will be even more helpful if you can load some USB keys.

New to drupal theming and site-building or still learning? Do you really want to know "Am I doing this right?" Or maybe you're tried of doing things the "hard way" or just not sure what are the best practices? This session is tailored specifically to beginners who want to check in with their process, learn some new tricks, and ask questions. There is a lot to know about Drupal and there are many ways to accomplish the same goal. So there are no absolute right answers here, just suggestions and discussion.

Overview of Potential Topics:

• Leveraging contributed modules.
• Interpreting Design and Backend needs.
• Slow site? Common performance pitfalls.
• Do I really need to know PHP?
• Tools that will make your life easier.
• Sub-theming and responsive theming.
• Site building and successful content strategy.
• Coding standards.

Beginners of all levels are welcome, but we will be talking "drupal" so a basic familiarity is helpful.

Your Drupal site launched! Now you need to know the best ways to support your site as it grows. Or maybe you've had your site for awhile (or taking over someone's work) and its starting to show some wear and tear. In this session, we will talk about methods and tools for supporting your site over the longterm.

How to manage the different groups that might be contributing to your website and their various levels of Drupal know-how.
How to audit your site and detect problems.
Security Reviews
Monitoring your site for trends.
Updates and Upgrades
What are the best ways to turn to Drupal.org and the Drupal community for support?
How to create awesome documentation.

Join in and share your best practices (or horror stories :)

Session Recap and Notes
Here are the slides from our presentation:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/pub?id=1nhTF-Olim9_xK3ethCUUlqSe1Cs...

ds.api.php which was mentioned in the presentation and documents all DS hooks is viewable in the DS module root or view it online in the git repo:
http://drupalcode.org/project/ds.git/blob/refs/heads/7.x-2.x:/ds.api.php

Here are the example modules from our presentation:
DS Demo Layouts
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bxj2mvCUTriHMlM1UHlMendneHM
DS Demo Templates
https://docs.google.com/open?id=0Bxj2mvCUTriHczhxMWM0TnpRSW8

For more information on DS you can look at swentel's videos (the developer for DS):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjOG8dVcN4Y&feature=BFa&list=PL7E361A5599...

About Display Suite

Display Suite allows you to take full control over how your content is displayed using a drag and drop interface. Arrange your nodes, views, comments, user data etc. the way you want without having to work your way through dozens of template files.

About the Session
This session will cover as much as possible regarding Display Suite. Due to the enormity of what it can do we may not be able to cover everything. Topics to be covered include:

• Customizing layouts
• Using view modes
• Custom DS fields and how to use them
• Custom field templates
• Custom field templates and usage of Custom Formatters module with Display Suite
• Semantic displays and theming guidlines

About the Presenters
Chris Perry and Nicholas Alipaz work for Stitch Technologies LLC, doing web design and development in Los Angeles.

Nicholas has been working in Drupal for 5 years and regularly contributes on Drupal.org.

Chris is the founder of a non-profit organization Pleinthkin Industries which provides comfortable low-cost kilts to feral children and animals in Duluth, Minnesota. He also enjoys creating business solutions in Drupal.

Modules you will need for the presentation
If you would like to follow along with your own install on your laptop then you will need the following modules:

• ctools
• custom_formatters
• ds
• entity
• field_collection
• reference
• views

$ drush dl ctools custom_formatters ds-7.x-2.x entity field_collection reference views

Install the following

• Chaos tools
• Comment
• Contextual links
• Search
• Taxonomy
• Display Suite 7.x-2.x-dev*
• Extras
• Search display
• Custom Formatters
• Field Collection
• Node Reference
• References
• Entity API
• Views
• Views UI
• Field Group

$ drush en ctools comment contextual search taxonomy ds ds_extras ds_forms ds_search custom_formatters field_collection node_reference references entity views views_ui field_group

Update: Here are the slides and the video .

Drupal offers a lot out of the box, but most likely you'll be drawing on the enormous contributed module repository for more. If you haven't been using Drupal for long, you might not be aware of the goodies that long-time users know. This session will offer an overview of the some of the best contributed modules for Drupal 7, helping you get off to a good start. I put "top" in quotes because that's subjective, although I think what I show will be considered the good stuff.

I gave a presentation like this last year as well, so depending on the audience, I might either skip the modules I talked about last year, or cover the same stuff, but leave off everything that was only for Drupal 6.

If you have suggestions or ideas, leave a comment!

some basic yet helpful css tricks and tips for Drupal developers

If you work in or serve a paperwork-heavy industry, such as finances/mortgages, real estate, government, education/schools, law, or sports, you may find that the delay between sending out a PDF form to be completed and receiving that form back are adding delay to your workflow. Even worse, you, your colleagues or employees might be hand-copying information from non-PDF formats to PDFs.

What you may not realize is that your visitors could be filling out forms on your site, and you could be letting Drupal populate your fillable PDF forms with that data! This is possible with a module called Fill PDF.

Rather than generating PDFs from scratch, this module re-uses form fields that you create with Adobe Acrobat®, Adobe LiveCycle®, OpenOffice™, or a compatible tool. This lets your PDF keep its formatting perfectly.

If this is already sounding like it would it save you time, this presentation is for you.

If you're a developer, this presentation is also for you. In fact, I can almost guarantee that your reaction will be, "I have a project I could use this on!" That's pretty common.

Presentation outline (the cool part is the Rules integration)
We'll look at how to set up a real-world form in Fill PDF. The end result will be much like the Fill PDF demo.

Then, I'll top it off by showing you the most awesome new feature in the entire lifetime of the module. It's on par with being able to stamp images on PDFs. It is the legendary...ability to e-mail the PDF as an attachment! This is made possible by the power of Rules and Mime Mail. This will blow your mind. It is awesome in ways that cannot be transmitted through textual explanation.

I'll take questions and tour additional module features with the remaining time. I'll also give a quick mention to Fill PDF Service.

Lots of people in real estate, as well as some in schools, sports organizations, and the mortgage industry use this module to ease the work of paperwork. It will soon break the 1,000-install mark on drupal.org. Come check it out!

P.S. If you checked this module out at SANDcamp earlier this year, check it out again. There have been several updates:

• The presentation is now entirely in Drupal 7
• You can stamp images from your site into PDFs
• Did I mention that you can e-mail the PDF as an attachment now?

Coupled with Adobe® Reader® X's* feature of placing signatures on PDFs, there's a lot of PDF potential with Fill PDF in your toolbox.

About the presenter
I'm the maintainer of Fill PDF. I don't think enough people know about this module and want to spread the word. I also want to spread the word since I run Fill PDF Service, one of three ways you can get this module to do its thing. I've been working with Drupal since 2007 (Drupal 5).

* I don't think they've trademarked X...yet.

Many websites feature slideshows on their front pages to give users a preview of all the cool content the site has to offer. Drupal's Views module makes it really easy to make your own custom slideshow

Showing how someone can go about creating a Drupal 7 site that is similar to Pinterest without having to do any PHP coding. Only using the modules that are out there to create a great user experience.

Thank-you to everyone who attended this session, it was great fun! I have updated the zip file on the download page, let know if it works now!

You can download cookbook PDF and zip file here: http://blank2livein45.douglaschoffman.com

Are you new to Drupal, but don't know where to start? This session is for you! In 45 minutes (or less), we will install Drupal 7, build a functioning web site and deploy it live to the Internet. I call the method we will use Codeless Drupal. No need for any of that pesky PHP or CSS or HTML stuff! Our site will be built with standard Drupal modules and a contributed (read free) theme. You will leave this session with an understanding of the basic building blocks of Drupal, including pages, blocks, menus, content types, fields, views, image presets and much more.