Drupal

For the last few months I have been playing with the Content Construction Kit and Views modules and the final result is the portfolio section of my site. With this I created a new theme as well using some new techniques that I have learned.

All of these things I will discuss, hopefully, over the next few days.

I've decided to put a new theme up. It is by far one of the best themes I have done to date, I've even started to use Drupal's theme override ability. (Exhibit A: the RSS feed has and Atom feed icon next to it.) Its very simple but it's a start.

Back to the title of this post, as any good web designer knows Internet Explorer is just plain bad. I spent the last two days trying to figure out why it was adding adding extra space to a DIV tag, needless to say I managed to find a work around. They say version seven is going to be better but I'll believe it when I see it, which won't be any time soon the the rate Microsoft is creating software.

BarCamp Cape Town was this weekend and since I live nowhere near Cape Town I didn't go but I wonder how many people in the Jo'burg area would be interested in BarCamp?

Drupal 4.7 is finally out after a year in development and this is the best version yet. The php template is now the default template engine and there are a lot of new features, such as free tagging, Ajax and a new contact form just to name a few. It also now comes with an installer but I have yet to test it out.

As you may have guessed this site has been upgraded and I still have others to do.

In other news I was ripped off by a dishonest ex-ModenBill reseller and it seems no one can find him, as for the software I'm no longer using it even though it was not ModernGigabyte's fault, I've had it with "proprietary complexity".

On the project front I've started to learn Python which has sparked renewed interest in Bazaar-NG. It's still early days for bazaar but I like the idea of a Python based VCS, I haven't decided yet but I could very well switch to Bazaar and the fact its backed by Canonical doesn't hurt either.

Adrian Rossouw: Announcing DrupalCamp Johannesburg - Over the last few years that I have been involved in the Drupal community, I have noticed only a handful of South African developers, and I've always wondered if there are more of us out there.

I have also been introducing many many people to Drupal, but unfortunately every time people try to approach me for projects, I have to turn them down, as I am just too busy building Bryght.

To combat this, I am going to be holding a training session on how to become a Drupal developer, for local web developers at the end of June. I hope to help bootstrap the local Drupal community so that we can have better representation from my fellow South Africans.

Considering that there are 11 pages of people who have specified that they live in South Africa on drupal.org, I will also be heading up a DrupalZA group on DrupalGroups, just as soon as I can get an administrator to create it for me.

If you are interested in being kept up to date about this, and being put on the mailing list for South African Drupal users, please contact me via my drupal.org contact form

EDIT : I have created the DrupalZA user group. You can join on groups.drupal.org. You can just log in with your drupal.org auth, so you don't even have to create an account.

read more [Planet Drupal]

I think South African Community has a better chance now we have a central place to work from.