Issue 11 December 1, 2011

Apps, Drupal Commerce, and the Death of Design! How's that for link bait? Enjoy.

News

Drupal Association News: Town Hall December 1st, 2011

Town Hall meeting we're going to be taking a look at DrupalCon's attendance and trends that are emerging. The meeting begins at 10am Pacific time.

Aegir 1.6 released

Drupal Commerce 1.1 Released

Drupal rock star and Commerce Guy Ryan Szrama announces the 1.1 release of Drupal Commerce hot off the presses. Ryan also highlights a couple Commerce based distributions for specific use cases. Glad to see that Drupal Commerce is moving along.

From Our Sponsor

Events

Drupal on the Bayou - A Drupal Summit

December 8th & 9th in New Orleans, Louisiana.

DrupalCampNYC 10

December 10th, 2011 in New York City.

DrupalCamp Chicago 2011

December 10th, 2011 in Downtown Chicago, Illinois.

Articles

Becoming friends with the Drupal Color module — Part 1

The Color module is a cool little module that can be used to allow users of a Drupal site to change the colors of various parts of a theme. Sampo Turve gives us a detailed tutorial showing how to implement this in a Drupal 7 theme.

Migrating a static 960.gs grid to a responsive, semantic grid with LessCSS

Ben Buckman has good tips and links in his post about responsive design. It's worth a read if you are considering converting a 960.gs theme to a responsive theme.

Apps: Making Drupal Distributions Work

Tom McCracken of LevelTen talks about the evolution of Open Enterprise distribution and it's use of apps. What is a Drupal app anyway? Tom says, "... where features are for coders, apps are for regular folks." That makes sense to me but I'm still a little skeptical of the application of this concept.

Programatically create new date type and date format

Does design matter?

Larry Garfield asks a question that might find odd, "Does design matter". He points out that things like Instapaper, feed readers, and mobile devices can completely override to design of our sites. There's some good discussion happening in the comments including my 2 cents on the subject. Spoiler, I disagree with Larry but he does bring up some good points.

larsolesen.dk: Creating an Drupal App Server

With all of the buzz about Drupal Apps, Lars Olesen gives us some help creating a server for these Apps.

Minisites in Open Atrium

Antonio De Marco of Nuvole has written up a very cool tutorial showing how Open Atrium can be used to create mini sites or minimal web sites on separate domains using the same Drupal installation. This setup could apply to a lot of different use cases.

Mearra: Drupal project management - Life cycle of a website

Videos

Commerce Guys Videos

Randy Fay has been cranking out the Drupal Commerce videos. Far to many to list but you should go over to the Commerce Guys site and check them out.

How to use render arrays and tabs in Drupal 7

We're partnering with BuildaModule.com to give you free access to great video training each week. This week we are featuring a video from the "Drupal 7 Development Core Concepts" collection coving render arrays. Chris is running a cool deal right now, get 50% off your first month subscription.

Projects & Modules

Module Monday: Views Quicksand

Views Quicksand makes it easy to use the very cool jQuery Quicksand plugin with Drupal. As always, Mr. Eaton does a fabulous job giving us the details.

Commerce Kickstart

"Commerce Kickstart is the quickest way to get you up and running with Drupal Commerce." Using Kickstart you can get a Drupal store up and going with all of it's dependencies included.

MartPlug

"MartPlug is a Drupal distribution tailored to make highly flexible online stores using Drupal and Drupal Commerce." If you are thinking of building a simple e-commerce site with Drupal Commerce, this distro might be a good jumping off point.

Podcasts

DrupalEasy Podcast 68: Chewbacca’s Bandolier

Lisa Rex, User Experience Designer of Acquia joins the DrupalEasy Crew to discuss the Drupal community and other topics.