June

June 24, 2009

Co-presenting "Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty" at DrupalCon Paris

Jake Strawn of Drupal Dynamics and I are teaming up to propose a Accelerated grid theming using NineSixty session for DrupalCon Paris. (To be fair, he beat me to it and was gracious enough to add me as a co-presenter.)

Our session will cover the following basics of the 960 grid system:

What is 960.gs?
Using the NineSixty theme as your starting point / parent theme
Understanding the grid-x, push-x, pull-x classes
Why a grid-based system can help speed up theme development
How to break the 960-pixel limit

In the last month, I have presented sessions on 960.gs and the NineSixty theme at DrupalCamps in Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Stockholm. Most recently, I co-presented a session at Drupal Design Camp Boston with Nathan Smith, creator of the 960 grid system. You can download the slide decks on our “Presentations” page.

June 21, 2009

Improvements to the Materialized View API

An eye-catching graphic, largely irrelevant to this blog post.

The Materialized View API (related posts) provides resources for pre-aggregation and indexing of data for use in complex queries. It does this by managing denormalized tables based on data living elsewhere in the database (and possibly elsewhere). As such, materialized views (MVs) must be populated and updated using large amounts of data. As users change data on the site, MVs must be intelligently updated to avoid complete (read: very slow) rebuilds. Part of performing these intelligent updates is calculating how user changes to data affect MVs in use. Until now, these updates had limitations in scalability and capability.

June 18, 2009

Bazaar 1.16 RPMs for RHEL 5 and CentOS 5

Fresh packages, 64-bit only. There are release notes for the curious.

June 14, 2009

OpenSolaris 2009.06 first impressions

I downloaded and installed OpenSolaris to experiment with its LAMP stack implementation. I eventually want to set up a headless, SSH-accessible box I can use to experiment with unique OpenSolaris features like dtrace on PHP and MySQL.

June 10, 2009

Advanced Drupal form theming: Take control of error styling with a form-item-error class

Note: This HOWTO covers Drupal 6.x.

By default, Drupal adds an .error class to the form element itself: textarea, select, input, and so on. Sometimes, that’s not good enough. Maybe a client needs the label’s color changed — or a big, red border encompassing both the label and input elements.

This can be achieved by overriding theme_form_element() to add an error class to div.form-item, the div that wraps all elements in a form.

June 3, 2009

Four Kitchens' website featured on 960.gs

Our website has been featured on 960.gs, home of the 960 grid system! This is quite an honor, as we’re big fans of grid-based design — especially 960.gs — and have begun implementing its principles and techniques in virtually every project.