Verbosity 2.0 ~ Talking about life on Drupal

I finally made it out to a real Drupal event!  Not just a local meetup... so much more than that.

The two-day educational networking event took place at North Studio - a Victoria web development firm which also does a lot of work in the computer training department.  Our schedule started with a focus on the basics: installation of Drupal, SEO techniques, a dash of Information Architecture and more.  That was all really valuable stuff, but for me it was a bit redundant.  If you've been following my threads for the past year you will probably understand what I mean.

What I Learned

The presentation on Actions, Triggers and Rules by Dave Tarc was insightful.  I have worked with Actions and Triggers on Drupal 6 and the Workflow-NG module for Drupal 5.  Rules takes over where Workflow-NG left off.  Essentially this module just lets you add some rudimentary logic to your Triggers so you can automate things on the site.  What could be better than automating things?  In my world: not much.

Great news today.  I have an office!

Since November 2008 I have been working with Geist Magazine helping to build out new functionality on the website and relaunch the site after upgrading it from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.  For nearly all of this work I have been coding from my home in East Van and/or nearby cafés.  I love cafés, a lot, but after awhile you just feel like you need your own space.  So here I am.

Geist occupies a shared office space with other arts groups at 341 Water Street.  There is at least one book publisher, a performing arts group and others.  My desk fits into the web corner, bounded by archives of the magazine and a window from which you can see the sun adorn the red brick of the building next door.

Are you tired of resizing your images, saving them, uploading them, only to find out that you need to do the whole process over again because you forgot to size the images correctly?

That was editing for the web a decade ago but it doesn't have to be that way any longer.  With Drupal you can manage your images online and this tutorial will show you one way that it can be done.

This howto is based on a Surrey Drupal User's group discussion where Ryan Dempsey talked about his favourite recipe for managing images.  This howto extends that discussion with the addition of some additional "nice to have" modules.

The good news? You can do most anything you need/want to do to images with Drupal.  The bad news?  Some fringe coding might be necessary to make it totally awesome. 

Drupal can make your website fully capable of managing images in a sane and logical way so we don't have to manually resize our images ever again.

Using Core Components aka. The Old Way

This collection of links originally appeared on my consulting website.  If you are a developer new to using Linux or Unix systems these guides will probably come in handy at some point.  Enjoy.