DCCO: Day 1

Back at the crash pad after a long but great day of Drupally sessions. We skipped the after party and had pizza at Wazee's. Good food.

Anyways, here's my breakdown of the days activities:

9:15 Welcome Session

Everyone was "Super Excited" about this Drupal Camp. Participation in this event has really boomed over the last two years. The first meeting was 15 people in the pingVision office. 2008 saw about 90 attendees if I remember correctly. This year boasted over 200+. Pretty impressive.

After a short set of thank you's and "Super Excited's" we broke and moved on to the sessions we had chosen. This was tough as in most cases there were at least two of the three concurrent sessions that were well worth attending.

10:00 Welcome to the Jungle! Basic Drupal Recipes and Best Practices for Beginners

I was really hoping that this session would clue me in to those few things that I was missing in the basics of Drupal. While there wasn't anything really groundbreaking there were some solid tips on some initial setup tips that can really help you out.

After the base installation is done, if you plan on having admin type users on the site, create a role called "admin" and give it all permissions on the permissions page. In a way it is a clone of User 1, with out actually being User 1. You should never hand out the User 1 password unless you are turning over the keys to the site.

Install the Admin Menu Module. It makes navigating to the administrative tasks you deal with on a regular basis super easy.

Install CCK and Views2 even if you have never used them. Then learn how to use them. They will save you big time even if you know how to write your own custom modules.

Finally, I recommend that if you haven't looked at Acquia Drupal yet you should. It comes bundled with all the really solid stable contrib modules that you will most likely want to install anyway.

11:00 The Uber Update: Ubercart 3.x on Drupal 6

To say that I am "Super Excited" about Ubercart is an understatement. Ubercart's philosophy of keeping the module as close to core as possible is very key. it integrates so tightly with your site that unless you need a super simple checkout it is THE eCommerce module for Drupal.

This session touched mostly on where Ubercart is right now. 2.x should be stable shortly and the battleplan for 3.x is already established. There was a small demo of their Checkout Customization that would allow site admins to customize their checkout steps using custom steps and Drupal's Drag and Drop ordering abilities. Need a complex checkout wizard? Done. Need it to be extremely simple and fast? Done. While still early in development it shows great promise.

12:00 Preprocess Functions - the what, why and how

This was a theming session and even though I don't do much with initial design at Pickering, making that design functional is a good chuck of what I do have to do. (It's not the best way, but we are still working on that process.)

I never really liked the idea that if I wanted to override the node template that I would have to create a node-page.tpl.php file in order to do so. While it was nice to not have to touch core code (ultimate no-no) it was still a little more than I really wanted to do.

"Preprocess to the rescue" as ultimateboy says. Rather than create that file, create a preprocess function in your template.php file. Call it yourthemename_preprocess_type(&$vars) and do what you need to do. Type refers to what template file you are trying to make changes to. Node makes it's changes to the node template. Page makes changes to the page template. By using the devel module and it's dpm() function you can find out all the page variables that you want to alter and use those in your preprocess function.

There's more you can do, like using your own template file names, ones that don't follow Drupal's normal naming conventions for lookups. You can add the name to the template_files variable and Drupal will then look for it. Very cool.

Don't take all of that as gospel, I might have the function names a little off (darn notes didn't save to GDocs). But if you are a themer, this is really good stuff.

Hopefully ultimateboy can make his presentation available as it would be a great benefit to the preprocess documentation.

2:00 Practical Views and CCK -- A Headache Free Image Gallery

I missed the first 20 minutes or so of this session as we were a little long on lunch (SushiHai was really tasty). The presenter focused on an example of using CCK and Views to accomplish a simple image gallery for a site. The process was faily simple and straightforward using a combination of Views, CCK and I believe FileField and ImageCache. There may have been more but I think that was all.

Ironically, he ended up having difficulty getting the images to appear in the grid format for the view. The pathing was correct, but the images just would not show up. Permissions were checked, settings were tweaked but to no avail. Then someone pointed out that Clean URL's were not enabled. Apparently ImageCache needs that as well as many other modules it seems. Once that was added to the site configuration things were joyful.

This is in now way a slam against the presenter. A week doesn't go by where I don't have something little causing me huge consternation in a build. The silver lining is that it was a very good example of troubleshooting a problem that doesn't readily present it's solution.

The presentation was very good and it was a shining example of how Drupal gives you the tools to do what you need as opposed to giving you a finished thing that is almost what you need.

3:00 Modules You Should Use on Every Site OR Stump the Chump

This was a great session. The presenters ran through a list fo the most useful modules that you can use to make killer sites. For me, Flag was a new one as well as Views Bulk Operations.

Flag, while simple add very useful functionality to a view. It is basically adding a boolean Yes/No On/Off to nodes. The camp used this in the checkin system in the morning. Having the list of all registered attendees, all they had to do was scroll through their view and taggle the flag for check in / uncheck in. Lots of potential there.

Views Bulk Operations can give you the ability to make large scale changes to your nodes. One example they used was the Drupal 7ux usability study site. They had forgotten to install a spam filter like Mollum and after a few weeks the site had spam comments that numbered in the thousands. Using Views Bulk Operations they were able to identify the offending comments by keywords and destroy them. Tons of potential there.

4:00 Node Access Control in Drupal: Unraveling the Mysteries

This session covered how Drupal handles access and how it allows modules to handle access. There were two basic types, Node Access and Node Access Modules. The first being how nodes that create their own content types control access to their node types. SimpleNews was an example. The second being modules that handle access control over all nodes. The big tip here was that there are a lot out there. Research them and use the one that best fits your needs. Use only one to prevent overlap. If you must use two make absolutely sure that they don't step on each others toes and handle on their own content types.

Some of the Access Control modules mentioned were Content Access, Organic Groups, Taxonomy Access Light and Domain Access. Domain Access is actully really valuable in it's ability to do multiple sites within the same Drupal install without doing a true multisite installation. It allows the subdomain sites to share and seperate content, use individual themes and many other useful things.

Taxonomy Access Light was also extolled by a few attendees as being very useful and very reliable. I have not used it yet but will definetly look into it.

5:00 Getting the most out of Drupal's taxonomy system

I was really looking forward to this session as I recognize the power of the tax, but have yet to really leverage it. The session stated as mostly a definition of taxonomy followed by a quick configuration of a vocabluary and it's terms.

He followed up with some very practical uses in taxonomy created menus and Views using taxonomy.

After this session I feel that to really get full milage out of Drupal an understanding of how taxonomy can be used is pretty important.

Wow. I'm tired. Tomorrow is looking good with even more sessions. I can't go to them all, but I'll try and give short reports on the ones I do.

Finish my Sunshine and hit the sack. Out.