JASON MARSHALL JOHNSON: December 2008 Archives
Well, I've done a lot with drupal over the past few weeks. Tasks like installing themes and modules once looked a little daunting, now they are a piece of cake. I've learned a lot about user privileges, page creation and general administration. The big question is, "where do I go now?".
I know that I want to take the tuba euphonium site live and have it help out the studio, but I'm not sure who I should contact first. Keeping the install on my personal space, even if I were to be approved for a MYSQL and PHP space isn't an option because that is wiped after I leave next fall. Letting it sit on my drive however, is not an option.
I suppose my next move will be to go to the Music Technology faculty and make a recommendation that part of the music server be prepped for the studio's drupal install. One thing is for certain I'll be keeping my default Garland theme as it seems to be the general consensus for Penn State's standard drupal sites.
...even if it is "easy" to do. I'm the type of person who thinks making a moveable panel work in a web-browser takes a degree from M.I.T and a million lines of code to accomplish.
I was perusing Panic Software's site a few days ago and I noticed a really cool sliding panel technique about halfway down their page for Coda. After playing with the buttons for a few minutes I asked Google if some developer had an idea as to how to replicate this "magic".
Turns out someone had a decent understanding of HTML CSS and a little jQuery and was kind enough to share the code. Not the world's most earth-shattering content, but a great design technique that hopefully (for my sake) looked a lot cooler than a few dozen lines of code.
I was attempting to export my Drupal install to my Macbook a few nights ago and I hit a bit of a wall. Somewhere along the way of my migrating folders, transferring data, or cleaning up I blew out my Administrator password to my local install.
To add insult to injury I could still login with a "johnny user" account but from there I was helpless. I could reset this user's password, but recovery features failed when I attempted to do the same for my Admin account.
Thinking that all was lost I started scouring the internet for a way to reset my admin password. It turns out that I'm not the only one out there who has done this thing. After fighting with the recovery tools and trying every combination I could think of I ended up returning to lynda's drupal files and watched the video entitled "Recovering from Disasters".
Aptly named, the video taught me about the MD5 encryption (and other encryption options) that drupal uses at a core level for all passwords. After using phpMyadmin I was able to drop my password and insert a new one which I was able to encrypt myself.
As some of you know my recital was moved back to January the 24th at 3:00 PM. At first I was not thrilled that I would be moving the dates back but I am beginning to think that this has been a blessing in disguise. Not only do I avoid having to cram for a recital during a 24 credit semester, but I can now relax and work on some neat advertising.
Tradition in the School of Music holds that students giving recitals always put up posters as a means of advertising. I've seen some absolutely hilarious posters over the past 4 years and I found myself itching to begin creating.
Below is my first recital poster, I got the idea from the Apple - Coldplay advertisement and soon found out that I was not alone. While I had some difficulty finding someone who claimed they could replicate the Adobe Aftereffects file of the commercial, I did find numerous posts on how to create something close in Photoshop. I looked over a few of them and I decided to go with Tutorial's offering.
This is what I came up with after about two hours of work in the app.
Themes and Styles are the obvious core visual components of Drupal and Movable Type installations. They provide elements for users to start their sites with easy, hassle-free setup and simultaneously allow the more adventurous (or experienced) user to have access to large amounts of customization.
I have struggled with importing and tweaking Drupal themes (a combination of CSS files) to bring a similar visual look to my Movable Type blog. It has been an interesting experience and I seem to be getting closer to the look and feel of my Drupal install.
I scoured the internet for a Garland based Movable Type theme (Drupal to MT) but my search turned up no results. Apparently, the community would rather go from MT styles to Drupal themes.
Jeff's work has given me a reverse look at some of the methods for bringing MT and Drupal together. I believe that the next move I will have to make will be to import all of the Drupal images into a separate folder in my MT assets directory. After that I will have to fix some CSS links and re-upload my new Styles.
republished from drupal blog
