Notes from DrupalCampLA 2008

This past weekend I made two different presentations and participated in a panel. Below are my notes from the presentations:

Drupal FormAPI

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. After the presentation I was asked a question about how to add additional form elements to forms using the new #ahah features. My answer was that there is now a module out called ahah_helper which makes doing something like this very painless! You don’t have to register any menu callbacks or do any of the lifting outside of your original form builder function. Its still fresh out of the kitchen but I would recommend giving it a try.

References

Drupal 6 Theme Functions and Template Files

Sometimes you can’t theme everything with css. You just can’t. This is where themable functions come in to save the day. The clean to implement, easy to use saviors to themers all over Drupal-land.

Thanks to all who attended my theme function presentations. At the culmination of our 3 one hour long sessions we went from what the template engine is, to calling theme functions in your template files and all the way to implementing our own function and template overrides with the help of the Devel module’s themer module.

Throughout the sessions I sprinkled in tid bits of debugging your code with the use of (Remember devel module must installed and active on your site). Additionally here is the snippet of code we run at the top of the template.php file during development to make sure that Drupal is picking up all of our new template/theme function changes. Remember to disable this before going to production.

I would say more here about what was presented but it really is too much and when the video comes out you will hopefully be able to watch and follow along again. In the case that it doesn’t I have posted up my presentation slides which were a rough outline that I followed during the presentation and I’ve also posted below the references listed at the end of the presentation. I highly recommend reading through these to help guide you on your journey to understanding Drupal’s theming system.

References

Thanks for joining me at DrupalCampLA!