Jason Heffner's Blog

The previous week I attended a Drupal Workshop in Rhode Island hosted by Lullabot. These are some of the folks who have contributed greatly to the Drupal Project, contributed modules, and to it's great documentation. They also create sites like Sony's Musicbox among others for large corporations all based around Drupal. If you are not familar about Drupal I posted on my blog space about it last month.

The workshop was split into 2 days for the Intensive session and 3 days focused on Theming. The overall goal for the Training was to create a fully functional Flickr equivalent, which was named Flippr. The end product can be seen at Flippr.net.

The Intensive part of the workshop focused on getting you familiar with the Drupal Core and its architecture, the drupal community, and contributed modules that can be used to build your websites. Some of the modules used to build Flippr included Buddylist, CCK, Views, Panels, Imagecache, Imagefield, Custom Pagers, Custom Breadcrumbs, and Tagadelic in a very similar way that Angie Byron (aka webchick) posted in an earlier article last year.

The theming portion took over where the first 2 days left off. Starting with a template and a custom css for the site, we added the necessary components to integrate the flippr layout into a new druapl theme, in a very similar fashion that was used on Flickr using PHPTemplate.

It was great to get to talk with some of the developers on the project and learn their view points, and shoot ideas off of them for some feedback. They introduced me to some new contributed modules I didn't know about, and gave me a better understanding of the overall community. We also learned about new upcoming features in Drupal 6 that makes theming sites even easier.