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:
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.
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.
I'm a fan of project management and project control processes, call me organized :O. Thus, I like to explore the various options that are available for managing projects with distributed teams. I've used a number of them including BaseCamp, Unfuddle, and activeCollab (when it was open source, the open source project is now http://www.projectpier.org/) mostly on small to medium sized projects. But today I want to introduce a new site that I found that I think has a lot to offer...
Welcome to the newly designed website. We'll be posting up more tutorials and articles soon so stay tuned!
A note about why using a content management system is so great: This site is powered by Drupal and because of that we were able to seamlessly integrate this new theme with our old content. We didn't have to redo any linking, or even touch any of the pre-existing content for that matter. From a web marketing standpoint, its actually quite nice because none of our existing feeds or page urls have changed. Why does that matter? Search engines have already indexed all of our pages which are tracked by their URL, since our URLs haven't changed, neither will our search engine rankings. Also, anyone who was previously subscribing to any of our RSS feeds, well they'll still be subscribing to the right feed.
After going to the local LADrupal meetup last night I've been inspired to start contributing more articles and hopefully some demonstrations via screen cast on how to develop by using drupal's hooks and core features.
How does this relate to posting comments on my blog? Well I'm sick of going through and seeing nothing but spam bots posting all over my site, so in an attempt to make this site more useful for others I am going to be requiring everyone who wishes to comment to login using their accounts at drupal.org.
I just registered for the fastly approaching Boston DrupalCon (http://boston2008.drupalcon.org/). I'm really excited to meet some of the members of the community that I've been working with over the past year. The last DrupalCon I went to was the Sunnyvale one at Yahoo! and I couldn't have been more thankful for all the great presentations.
My hopes for the upcoming DrupalCon:
Using Drupal's form api can often times make form validation and submission handling simple and effective. Today's tip is about using the form_set_value($form, $value) function to change a form item's value during the validation phase. This is convenient if you've done any manipulation to the submitted data during the validation process and you don't want to have to redo it in the submit process.
