Posted on by Tendenci Open Source Software

DrupalCon Day 2: A whole lot of nerdery

DrupalCon Day 1 was a blast with a ton of good information, but Day 2 was a whole lot nerdier in our sessions. So, as with our last post, there may be a nerd alert necessary.

Making Maps Beautiful

If you’re a Drupaler and want to make sure your maps look beautiful, we attended a session on ways to make Drupal maps beautiful. Hint: You don’t always need to use Google Maps.

  1. Check out the OpenLayers module. It’s an open source javascript library that allows theme-ing of maps so you can make them look way more beautiful.
  2. Open Stream Maps is an open source mapping system that is similar/rivals Google Maps. There are (believe it or not) instances where clients cannot use Gmap (or Drupal’s Google Maps module); Open Stream allows for another option.
  3. Bring it all together by using the MapBox module which allows you to provide layers (e.g. selected boxes that show/hide information) on your maps (even Google Maps!).
  4. And let’s not forget about TileMill. You can use it to create custom tile sets—it’s a WYSIWYGish editor to create a look for a map and map interactions. As they say, they’re a “a modern map design studio
    powered by open source technology.” They do all the heavy CSS-lifting to making your maps pretty. USE THIS.

Drush Make

I was completely, totally, and utterly humbled by dmitrig01. Here’s the nerdy part: Below is a basic Drush Make file (there’s a lot that goes in before this, but hit up Schipul and we can help you out). The idea is that within literally a few lines of code, you can launch a “News” site or a “Video” site, all using Features and Drush.

By the way, dmitrig01 is a 15-year-old 10th grader who is an incredible speaker and actually wrote Drush Make. He spoke at 12-years-old at DrupalCon. I was still learning what women were when I was 15.

A basic, annotated Drush Make file

Hopefully this can get you started:

core = 6.x (Tell it what version of Drupal you're using)
api = 2 (What version of Drush Make we're running, found on Drush Make download page)

projects[cck] = 2.9 (Tell it which version of the module you're grabbing)
projects[features] = 1.0
etc...

projects[news_item][type][module]
projects[news_item][download][type] = get
projects[news_item][download][url] = URL (can be localhost, e.g. http://localhost/...)
projects[news_items][subdir] = features

We’ll be back tomorrow to drop some more nerdery on your ass!