Posted 07.24.2010 by Jack
Presented by Theresa Summa (theresaanna) and Seth Cohn (sethcohn)
- Looked at a non-Drupal site, cnn.com - cramming as much information on one page as possible - they throw as much on the page as possible to appeal to as many different people as possible
- observer.com - a Drupal site that does something very similar
- How do you standardize the display of each piece of content on your site (e.g. pictures in proper sizes, providing all essential data, formatting it)
- economist.com and globalpost.com - more content-rich sites built in Drupal
Imagefield
- let users upload images in a CCK node
- lets users upload multiple images, sort the list to select which is going to be featured on the front page, the others get inserted into the content appropriately and in a consistent way by Drupal
- bulk uploader available
Imagecache
- resizes/crops images on the fly according to your preset dimensions
- helps standardize image sizes across the site
- Imagecache is included in Drupal 7 core, hurrah!
- Imagecache presets stop large images from breaking your layout
Quicktabs
- allows you to combine multiple items into one Quicktabs block with tabs on the top
- Nice jQuery action to allow users to switch from one section to the next, loaded all at once, or via Ajax on the fly
- Plays nicely with Views, individual Nodes, and multiple Blocks
Views Slideshow
- the recommended solution ("best of the breed" according to Seth) for rotating carousel type things
Panels
- Provides a drag and drop interface for units of content on the site to be added, deleted, and arranged in a layout on the fly
- "is all sorts of insane magic"
- pros for Panels - great Views integration, user friendly for non-techie users
- Negative - spans between modules and theme layer, so it's slower, performance hit on your site, takes a lot of liberties
- If you're a themer, you might be able to do without panels
Composite Layout
- could be called Panels Light
- gives you the Panels approach but does it on a node by node basis - you can choose predesigned layouts on a node by node basis, e.g. a different layout for each individual blog entry, on the fly.
- Display Suite is another alternative
Vertical Tabs
- for the content adding and editing side of the site - much easier
- divide your node add/edit forms into sections with vertical tabs on the side, collapsed along with a summary of the collapsed settings.
- Makes large content types easier for content producers to maintain
- Drupal 7 includes this in core, Drupal 6 module mostly works well
Arrange Fields
- http://drupal.org/project/arrange_fields
- First commit was 5 weeks ago as of 7/24/10 so is early on, but lots of potential
- "This module lets you drag-and-drop the fields of any CCK content type, Webform, or almost any other form in Drupal into the positions you would like for editing. This makes it super simple to have forms with inline fields, which you can change at any point. Tab indexing is also updated, so no matter how you arrange the fields, the users can still tab through them easily. And, you can now add arbitrary bits of HTML markup-- labels, images, HR's, etc."
CCK Fieldgroup Tabs
- separate CCK fields onto a completely separate tab to break down long node creation forms
Random Notes
- check out Nodequeue again for arbitrary lists of nodes, drag and drop
- you can feed Nodequeues through views
- Imagefield Insert module
- get good at Views theming - so much can be done!
- My question: what's the best practices approach to fine-grain tuning of everything via node-whatever.tpl.php files vs doing as much as possible within the CSS. Answer: there are a lot of different philosophies; have to consider how custom and how specific this content type needs to be displayed. If it can be done through CSS fairly easily, go for it; there's a performance hit to loading bunches of node-whatever.tpl.php vs using already loaded & cached CSS. Theresa says her philosophy is to keep the number of files down as much as possible.
- Omega theme (Theresa: "If Zen and 960gs had a baby, it would be Omega"