Happy New Year! We're kicking off 2013 with some FREE videos to get people up and running with our Drupal community tools. There are a lot of aspects of the Drupal community that many people take for granted. Even something as "simple" as figuring our what community websites are out there, and how to use them, is often overlooked when talking to people new to Drupal. So, if you want to really dive into this Drupal thing in 2013, here is a gentle orientation to help get you started.
In this lesson we show how everyone can help with the Drupal.org documentation. We take a quick look at some of the links and information that is available to everyone with a Drupal.org account, and then we dive in to make our first edit to an existing page. We run into Drupal.org's spam protection, so we also walk through getting ourselves on the no spam list for the site. After we complete our edit, we then see how to add our own new handbook page, by creating documentation for a contributed module, which doesn't have a page yet. We finish up by creating an issue in the module's issue queue, to get a link to our new page added to the module's project page. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.
In this lesson, we take a tour of the *.drupal.org websites, as there is a lot more than just the main Drupal.org site. After our tour, we'll walk through getting an account, and see how that gives us access to all of the Drupal.org web properties. We'll play with our Dashboard, and join a group on groups.drupal.org, to become more active in the community — the best way to learn and get help. You'll see us use the Drupal.org issue queue in this video. For more detailed information about that, see our Getting Started in the Issue Queue video.
Release Day: Drush Make and Policy Files
Blog postThis week, we are wrapping up 2012, and our Coding for Drush series. The last videos in this Drush series will take a look at some really neat things you can do with your new-found Drush skills. The first thing we want to look at is creating policy files for your Drush command. This allows you to essentially provide access control for your commands. You can check who is trying to run the command and stop it from proceeding. After we get that in place, we wrap up with two videos about Drush make.
As we work our way through December, we are also working our way through the Coding for Drush series. This week we have three new videos, which cover a bunch of extras to add to our drush command. We'll be looking at how to add additional help information, and prompt the user for more information. Then we'll take a dive into some more advanced things with specifying version numbers, and even the Drupal bootstrap level required.
Help Us Plan for 2013
Blog postAs 2012 winds down to a close, the Drupalize.Me team has been looking forward to our big plans for 2013. We are still in the thick of working on our site upgrade to Drupal 7, which should come along in early the in the new year. After that, we have a lot of big sky ideas we want to tackle. We'd love to get some feedback from you to help us refine those goals, by taking a quick survey.
Coding for Drush Series
Blog postThis week we're releasing a new series, Coding for Drush. If you've ever used Drush, and wondered how you can create your own custom Drush commands, then this series is right up your alley. When I sat down to start planning the content for our recent Coding for Views series I found myself in a position where I needed to quickly generate a bunch of random data for a custom module’s database table, so that when querying the table with views there would be something there.
Today's release day is a mixture of free videos! We have two new videos to add to our Command Line Basics Series, covering Bash aliases and working with MySQL. In addition to those lessons, we are also releasing a short four-video series about Using the Ooyala module with Drupal. Ooyala is a paid video delivery service, which manages your videos and handles video delivery to your site.
This video looks at the basics of working with MySQL from the command line. We get into the mysql environment and look at databases, tables and fields. We cover creating and deleting databases, creating a user, and querying within a particular database.
Note: In some places the command line prompt is cut-off. The YouTube version of this video doesn't have the cut-off problem. We are working on getting this fixed, but in the meantime, check out the YouTube version instead.
Command Line Basics 13: Using MySQL from Command Line (youtube.com)
This video shows you how to create your own custom shortcuts for various commands. We'll look at some common aliases and see how to add them to our command line environment. This is super handy for commands that you type in all the time and don't want to go through the tedium of typing the whole thing out every time. For example, we show how to automatically go to a particular directory with just one word (e.g. type "clients" and go to the /Users/add1sun/lullabot/clients directory immediately).
So, we now have all of our CSS and HTML in our sub-theme. In this lesson, we've moved over the remaining files that our theme will need, like the images folder, and our node template files. The last step to finish this theme up, is to modify our CSS to take advantage of the responsive framework we already have in place. To do that we'll:
- Review the theme files
- Look at our default CSS file
- See the responsive changes
We're in the home stretch with our theme, so let's make our CSS responsive and wrap things up.
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
In this lesson we have fast-forwarded some by completing the conversion of our old page.tpl.php into the new Omage theme. We'll take a look at the work we've done to get to this point, and then deal with what looks like could be a tricky HTML wrapper problem by creating a new zone for our theme, and configuring it to meet our needs. So, we'll:
- Review templates and variables
- Add a new zone to our theme
- Configure our regions with the new zone
This is where we can really see how to blend the usefulness of code and configuration in Omega, to accomplish our task in a very simple way.
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
We have a custom template file that has the HTML that we want, but not all of variables are coming through yet, and instead we are getting "Undefined variable" errors. In this lesson we're going to take care of that, as well as making sure our custom variables from the original 960 Robots get moved over as well. Omega has its own best practices around adding preprocess and process functions to a sub-theme, so we'll walk through what Omega expects, and how to use the files and examples that Omega is providing for us. So we're going to:
- Look at the Omega best practices
- Create a process include file
- Add our region variables
- Add our custom variable from 960 Robots
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
Tired of Stressful Launches?
Drupal is an endlessly flexible and configurable tool. It’s also very complex. So, when it comes to building real-world, usable sites, there’s a lot to know: planning, budgeting, wireframing, picking which new tools and modules to use, migrating content, managing go-live and so much more. Phew!
Lullabot’s team has successfully designed, developed and launched some of the biggest websites in the world -- Harvard, MIT, Martha Stewart, the Grammys, WWE and Verizon, just to name a few -- and we want YOU to learn from our experience!
For this lesson we get to finally start to convert our 90 Robots theme into our Omega sub-theme. We're going to take a look at what we have the original 960 Robots files, and start to move that into our 960 Robots Omega theme. To start things off we will:
- Review theme files
- Move main.css into the global.css file
- Begin converting the page.tpl.php
- Create a custom region template
Here is where the rubber meets the road for making our sub-theme look the way we want it to, so let's dive in.
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
The combination of Omega, Alpha and our new 960 robots base theme means that there are a pile ton of CSS files included in our pages now. These CSS files provide the foundation for some of the coolest features in Omega like the mobile first approach and the ability to provide a responsive design. Lets take a look at
- The various CSS files included by alpha, Omega, and our subtheme and how they work together
- Do a quick expirement to demonstrate the various CSS files associated with Omega's media queries
- Talk abou the HTML output by the Omega theme and how it's structured.
So put on your goggles beacuse we're about dive deep into the land of responsive CSS.
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
In this lesson we will be covering how take all the settings we have made for our 960 robots subtheme and export it into code. We will cover multiple ways of doing this and why this is a good practice to get into when working with different environements and/or other team members. We also cover adding features to the .info file from our exisiting theme into our new Omega sub-theme. So basically, this lesson will cover
- Exporting your theme
- Why export?
- 3 Different methods of export
- More theme conversion
Once the lesson is complete you will become an exporting guru and impress your friends at just about any gathering with your Omega Exporting amesomeness.
Additional resources
You can download the final Ninesixty Robots Omega theme as a regular project from Drupal.org.
In this post I'm going to give a little bit of insight in to how we are planning (and currently attempting) to migrate all the data from our current Drupal 6 site to our new Drupal 7 site using a couple of handy tools like Jenkins CI, bash shell, drush and the migrate module.
Besides working with sections, zones, regions, and responzive settings, Omega provides lots of other features that make using it a good choice for your theme. Omega also offers:
- Ability to enable/disable script libraries
- Ability to enable/disable theme style sheets
- Ability to enable/disable core/contrib stylesheets
- Typical theme settings
Getting to know these settings certianly helps set the look and fell as well as the capabilties of your theme. With the ability to do things like adding the Equal heights library and enabling it across your zones is just a handy feature and it's free with Omega.
Because Omega doesn't make assumptions about your layout, it comes with lots of options and plenty of regions to work with. This is great but also has some down falls espcially if you are converting an exisiting theme that just doesn't need as many regions and zones. Along with removing regions you may need to add some as well. In this lesson we will demonstrate:
- Adding a region
- Removing regions
- Placing content into these regions
- Cleaning up the .info file
Once this is complete, we now have our converted theme setup just as it was before when it comes to the grid system and some blocks in place to make sure the layout is looking good.
NOTE: Kyle initially sets a position, but not the weight, of the footer_bottom region in this video, and then you'll see that he catches the mistake, and fixes it to have a weight of 3.