On the Inside

Check out this news post for a few more details:

http://www.ubercart.org/news/oct-09-2007/vote_ubercart_coolsw

Basically, Intel made a Digg-like site for cool software projects, and I firmly believe that's Ubercart. I'd love it if everyone here would go take a moment to register and vote us up to the top of the list.

Go Ubercart, go!

Click here to vote!

Well, I'm speeding off on a plane to Barcelona, Spain (where it hopefully won't rain). But I've got no more time to make up more rhymes... just a quick announcement for you. I'll be keeping the Drupalcon Womblog going at my new site, By Wombats. Be sure to check it out for my reports and pics from the conference and the city. Can't wait to get there! (But I have no clue what I'll do once I get there. I have no clue how I'll get around or how I'll pay for anything. But some details are less important than others. I DO know Drupal, and I'm pretty sure my wife will be with me. )

Man and wife! That's what Christina and I are as of August 18th, 2007. I posted recently with my thoughts and feelings, about the incredible blessings we've been receiving and are continuing to receive from family and friends, and about our upcoming journey to Barcelona, Spain for this year's Drupalcon. Unfortunately, the web host I use had a crash and had to roll back to a backup version of the databases. Good for me I don't update very often. I only lost one post!

I'll try to get it back up as soon as possible, but that just doesn't happen quickly when you don't have an internet connection at home!

Woohoo! I finally rolled out the initial release of Ubercart today. It took a few extra hours after everyone had gone home and the phones stopped ringing for me to finalize everything, but it's up! It's wonderful to be at this first milestone in development... It's taken us 6 months of development (with vacations and many sales calls in the mix) to get this out the door, but we've finally arrived.

Now, I am tired. And my butt hurts from sitting at my desk from 8 AM to 8 PM. (To be fair, I did have an hour break to head to Fazoli's for some lunch and a bit of reading in this week's Time and Children of Dune.) I look forward to a pleasant little conversation with my fiancee and a night of sweet, ubercartish dreams.

http://www.ubercart.org/news/mar-19-2007/initial_ubercart_release

I recently revamped the front page look at Ubercart.org in preparation for an eventual (hopefully sooner rather than later) first release. In the process, I learned once again that all the wonderful contributors have made Drupal an excellent tool for designing web pages. With a simple combination of Panels, Views, and Drupal's own content type creation, I was able to achieve what you see there with no headache whatsoever. It was just too easy!

What isn't necessarily easy is knowing the tools exist to do something like that and how to use them together for your site. I decided to spend some time writing up my experience, including the preliminary thought processes and then actual configuration of the modules, so others could benefit from my fun. The voice in the tutorial is pretty informal, but I trust it gets the job done. Also, I'm just darn proud of the end result and thought I'd put this up to get some feedback while helping people, too.

Purpose: Describe the thought processes and modules used to design the front page of Ubercart.org, a site designed to be both an information portal and user/developer community.

Modules explained: Drupal's own content type creation, Views, and Panels.

Honorable mentions: Deciding on what to display, visual aids, "enhancing" the forums and Navigation menu.

Well, the goal of this article is to explain to you how I constructed the front page at http://www.ubercart.org using some awesome contributed modules, a little bit of HTML, and some great free icons. We're preparing the place to be a community site, and a straight list of recent nodes just wouldn't cut it. I also didn't want to settle for a simple node that I update with new information every so often, so I finally got around to downloading the latest versions of the Panels and Views modules and set to work.

I wanted to post a quick entry about a work project that has finally been completed and deployed. Much of the module development at work has been long term, so it's hard to see "completed" results. However, I just finished the TAPIr module, an integral part of the Übercart system. It defines a Tables API for use by module developers to create configurable, extensible tables and print them to a page in much the same fashion as the Forms API handles forms.

This is the blog site, similar to mine, of fellow Drupal developer Greg Holsclaw. He also runs http://www.skejo.com, a site where I post my articles related to Drupal development. He's now officially a developer for vbDrupal, as well, an open source hybrid of vBulletin and Drupal available for those with a vBulletin license.

Until today I hadn't seen the Tango Icon Library. Now that I've seen it, I can't believe I missed it in Drupal's documentation. (Well, the link is in a page that's mildly difficult to find.) Regardless, this is an excellent package of icons recommended by the Drupal handbook for use in Drupal modules.

http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Gallery

Perhaps that page needs to be updated to reference the Lullacons as well.

If you aren't sure what Drupal is, you're staring at it. If you aren't sure what Tagadelic is, then look to the left of this post at the section that says Browse by category. That is the work of the Tagadelic module for Drupal. It allows you to display a list of "tags" made up of the different categories (taxonomy terms) in a category group (vocabulary). These tags are weighted so that categories with more posts in them show up in a larger, bolder font. Tagadelic made its debut two Drupal versions ago in Drupal 4.6 and has yet to be updated for version 5.0.

How in the world did I get it on my site, then, when I converted to 5.0? That is what I have been asked to tell you, and you may read on to find out if that is your question, too.

Incredible set of tutorials for Drupal from a developer's perspective. I'm posting this so I can find it later.

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/ibm/osource/implement.html

(They keep adding to these tutorials, so be sure to check back. They're very thorough and cover just about any aspect of building a Drupal site and developing modules imaginable!)

Provided by the Lullabots, a handy package of free to use icons... you can use them for anything, so why not use them with your next Drupal application?

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/free_gpl_icons_lullacons_pack_1

(I'm using them for Ubercart, and even made my own. )