I did the following presentation at DrupalDaze last weekend. It is for very beginner users to understand how Drupal themes are made!

First, make sure your site (or page) is very stripped down. Take out anything that might make it complicated — like javascript or anything dynamic. You can add functions back in later.

We’ll start with a page that looks like this as an example:

http://www.pinkslipmedia.org/ideacoop

It’s pretty simple. You have two menus (one won’t be dynamic since it is image-based and the other in a sidebar that can readily expand with other blocks) content title, content, images, and a footer.

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Credit where credit’s due — The Art Lab’s original post about this “maintainable gallery”. I’m only updating this with adding on how to do multiple galleries.

First: a fresh install on Drupal 5.8 (Drupal 6 modules aren’t QUITE there yet, I tried!)

Enable Clean URLs

Required modules

• CCK
• Imagefield
• Image API
• Imagecache
• Views
• View Bonus Pack
• Thickbox

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Drupal Daze is this weekend. I’ll be posting my presentation notes here shortly as I prepare. Very exciting!

I owe a couple people several beers for their help with the lightbox. You know who you are! Roger’s design is, of course, beautiful.

A few sites I’ve done for the Learning Technology Center at the Science Museum as of late. They are both Drupal, and very similar concepts. The other exciting thing is that these sites (and a few others) are all part of a Drupal multisite just for the LTC. So these are all pointing to the same Drupal installation! Very happy with that.

I received my artwork from Laser Rosenberg this week, in exchange for coding his website. Here’s a poor photo of it — you’ll find a better example here. It’s called “Eliminating Negative Thoughts,” which goes well with one of my favorite X songs: I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts.

Yes, I was there. I’m still decompressing.

Team Open Circuit, after being awake and working for 30 hours. I was delirious from the red-eye flight from San Francisco, and anticipating my flight to Boston in a couple hours. Not my normal week.

I participated in a 24-hour web design challenge this past weekend. Our group from Twin Cities Open Circuit was paired with an excellent nonprofit, Doorstep Healthcare Services, which literally brings the medical professionals and equipment to the doorstep of many people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it. It was a nerve-wracking experience trying to “make it work” in a mere 24 hours, but also completely amazing and fun. Thanks to my teammates Bryan, Chach, Crystal, Kristen, Craig, Thomas & Bretton for making it happen, Sierra Bravo for putting it on, and Shira for being such a great client to work with!

Here are some photos of the madness:

I’ve been working on a cool project to document anything free, underground, hidden, radical or otherwise interesting in the Twin Cities. I got to practice some Drupal along the way - check out this map I made, and add places to it!

My evening consists of: brushing up on javascript (yikes — too little, too late), listening to Meneguar (house of cats — funny because when I stayed with their roommate once, I got sick with cat allergies), and picking out creepy dolls and stuff for our work haunted house.

My flapper mummy costume — not quite as entertaining as Aaron’s mummy-with-fez-and-moustache or Matt’s astromummy-dressed-up-as-cowboy-for-earthling-Halloween.

I’ve been pretty busy with making sites lately — more of these posts to come in the next few weeks.

Roger did the design and I made the site and set up the shopping cart — my first shopping cart. I used OSCommerce, a free open-source cart, which was simple enough, but I spent a lot of time taking out ugly clip art that was hard coded into the PHP, which was a little odd. I also found the plug-ins to be precarious — they aren’t self-contained packages, so you have to edit code in your pages and run the risk of making other add-ons stop working. That made me a little uncomfortable! But, so far so good!