Over the next few days/weeks, I'll be devoting a little time to Open Source Catholic, a new website for Catholic techies, web developers, communications personnel, and others involved in promoting the Catholic faith via new technologies. Expect more news on this front if I ever have time... for now, check out the website, see how it was made (series still in progress over on Midwestern Mac), and contribute!
From the website:
Part 2 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.
Well, one plane flight down, and a conference to go, I have the main structure of the theme set up (locally; haven't pushed it out to opensourcecatholic.com yet). I decided to go with Zen 2.x's -dev releases, for the simple fact that it's new and the way the Zen project is moving. There are a few rough areas in the documentation, mostly in the 'Readme' file for installing a subtheme, but I got through everything okay.
This theme, I hope, will make its way onto the fine Drupal.org theme repository; getting a CVS account, I'm sure, will be fun ;-)
Part 1 of a series: Building out a full Drupal site in a weekend.
Before you start building your website, you need to get all the parts of the site together, and have a good plan for what you'll need and how you'll do it. For many organizations, this can be a huge hassle, as you'll have to go through planning meetings, make diagrams, have all kinds of changes, and end up pre-stressed... and that's before you start working on putting the site together!
Luckily, for this website, the requirements are pretty simple: I can do whatever I want. But I can't get started from that point, so I put a few requirements down on paper, then grabbed everything I needed.
This weekend I am going to attend the Catholic New Media Celebration. I'll be on two plane flights, I'll be sitting at an airport for a few hours before each flight, and I'll be at a convention all day Saturday. I'm hoping to build out a new site idea I've had lurking in the back of my head for some time: Open Source Catholic.
In the past 45 minutes, I've been jumping around Drupal.org downloading all the different modules and tutorials I think I'll need. I've also saved some of my previous work on other Drupal sites in case I need to refer to a code snippet along the way while I don't have Internet access. I'm going to call it a night for now (I need to pack!), but tomorrow, beginning at the airport, I'm going to start working on the site.
Taken earlier today, for Steubenville St. Louis Mid-America:
More information about the photo can be found on the Flickr page (click on the photo to view). I really, really, really like the D90 paired with the 50mm f/1.4 lens!!
Be sure to check back in over the next few days—tons of information from the Archdiocese and the Review about the Pallium pilgrimage in Rome, and tons more about the Catholic New Media Celebration!
I just finished rolling a patch for fixing node.tpl.php in Drupal 7 over on the Drupal.org issue queue; hopefully it's ready to be rolled into core, as it's been weeks months since that particular issue was started. Page.tpl.php is already complete. We still have a few more to go, including comment.tpl.php, block.tpl.php and a bunch of little .tpl.php files.
I think Drupal 7 is going to be the best release of Drupal yet, in terms of being able to have a lot of appeal to non-programmers/techies. I set up my first ever full-fledged Wordpress site a few days ago, and it was super-easy to get things going (although also severely limited in what it could do, compared to a base Drupal install with Views and CCK), choose a new theme, change some settings, and hit the ground running.