This past weekend I made two different presentations and participated in a panel. Below are my notes from the presentations:
This presentation was a quick run down of how to use the FormAPI to create... forms! Examples included a basic one page form and multi-step forms using $form_state['storage']. There was also a demo of how to use the new #ahah feature.
Ever tried to set an error to a fieldset element in the form validate function (form_set_error function)? I tried it and it didn't work. So after some digging around form.inc I found the answer (a clean fix at that!).
Tutorial Requirements:
A little bit of foresight and planning went a long way in the creation of the new tour website for rock legends R.E.M. I'd like to take a moment to share with everyone the approach we took in creating the RSS powered social media website that centralizes concert media from various sources across the web.
Today I found a very informative blog post on the boxes and arrows user interface and web usability website that talks all about creating a better search experience for website visitors. During the Birds of a Feather session at DrupalCon Boston many of these key aspects of search were discussed and are on the agenda to be addressed at the Minnesota Search Sprint next weekend.
Last weekend we held our first hands on Drupal Theming and Site Building workshop. The workshop was a success in helping the participants fully visualize the process that is known as Drupal theming. Many contributed modules were covered like Views, Panels, CCK, Emfield and more. Special attention was given to the properly using template file overrides and working with the template.php file from the Zen theme.
Today I am posting some of the notes and code snippets that were used during instruction and demonstration for all to enjoy.
After the first release of our textmate bundle we decided that people may want to see what it contains before they download and install it. In the video we go over how to use the bundle with some simple examples.
Our custom Textmate Bundle (the rocking Mac OS X text editing tool) that we use in house to ease our typing during development. The bundle includes a number of tab trigger snippets. We know that it isn't complete with every hook, but we've just made them for the hooks we use most often. In future releases we will make be adding new shortcuts and as we do more Drupal 6 development we will be sure to release an updated version for 6.x!
More information about Textmate and Textmate Bundles.
At DrupalCon there was a Search BoF with about 20 people present. We primarily discussed integration with the Lucene/Solr search engine, but then concluded that creating a Search API that allowed for other search engines to plug into it would likely be the best approach. This type of approach allows small site owners to keep using integrated drupal search and larger site owners the option to integrate a more robust search engine with more features.
Another important part of what happened was David Lesiuer showed all of us his own custom drupal driven search engine module called Faceted Search (http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search). He has written a module which gives a views-esque type admin interface to creating any number of different search pages that site owners can create and allow their users to use. After seeing what an incredible job he has done with his search interface many at the conference agreed that it going down the path of creating a pluggable API with more features is a must have for Drupal.
Last night I did a presentation on the Panels 2 module at the local LADrupal user group meet up. This session followed a great introduction to the views module put on by Michael Thorne.
As promised I have put together a list of references for those looking to learn more about the panels module and I also packaged the custom module that I wrote to demonstrate how to add your own custom layout. You may notice I added more annotation to the code as well as a second layout. I tried to be as verbose as possible on how it works, but as always don't hesitate to ask any questions that you may have.
Using a captcha on your website is one of many ways to help protect it from spam and it just so happens that Drupal has a few contributed modules that make implementing one quite easy. Today we will talk about using the Captcha and reCaptcha modules to protect your website from spam.
