My Thoughts...

Oct05

A Challenge from my Father

My Dad does support and development for a fairly large SharePoint intranet. I was helping him troubleshoot a small problem today, and somehow I managed to bring Drupal into the conversation:

by the way,
soultion == Drupal
Sheena Donnelly @ 3:34

Does Drupal do everything?
Dad @ 3:35

Yes!!
Sheena Donnelly @ 3:35

Bet it can't kill Zombies!
Dad @ 3:35

....
Sheena Donnelly @ 3:35

I bet someone could write a module that kills zombies!!
Sheena Donnelly @ 3:36

/br...














Sep19

PSD to Drupal Theme

Today I gave an at least marginally successful presentation on Drupal Theme Development at DrupalCamp Atlanta. I hope everyone who attended learned something or at least know where to look for further advice and guidance on building their first Drupal theme. I apologize to anyone who may have wasted their time :)

Whatever your opinion is of my presentation, please give me some feedback!! - http://speakerrate.com/talks/1471-psd-to-drupal-introductory-theme-devel.../a...

Aug31

Drupal Theme Developer GUI

The 'ol epic battle between designers and developers has kicked up some dust again in the Drupal world, just in time for DrupalCon Paris. I wish I could be there, not just because it's Paris, but because this time around I think I have an idea that's worth some attention from the community as a whole.

@purrin asked the other day,

If you could make one improvement to #Drupal to make it more #design friendly... What would it be?

and I twittered back...

GUIs for things currently buried under PHP; adding/manipulating variables (template.php),...

Aug30

Drupal Theme Layer Illustraiton

In a few short weeks I will be presenting an introductory theming lesson at DrupalCamp Atlanta. One of the main goals of my session is to have the audience come away from my presentation with a very solid understanding of exactly how the different pieces of a theme and the rest of Drupal work together to produce an HTML page. To that end, I've begun working on a diagram to illustrate the different pieces of a theme and how they work together.

View the (very...

Aug17

Newsprint: A Contrib Theme?

For some reason, I've been wanting a challenge lately. Particularly, I've been wanting to create a web design for a site that was seriously heavy on content, like a newspaper, but with a very specific style. Unfortunately, none of our current client's sites are that particularly heavy on content and none of them come close to fitting into the style I wanted to explore.

Born is the beginning of what might become a contributed theme. Maybe. Considering how much work building this is going to be, and considering "these tough economic times" it's really hard for me to completely abolish the idea of putting this bad boy up on theme forest...

Aug14

On the Disappointing Redesign of Drupal.com

There was a little rumble on the Tubes Friday about the redesign of Drupal.com. Mostly I just saw a few folks doing the sycophant dance and expressing how awesome and beautiful the redesign is. These people must have a much different definition of "awesome" than I do. Or perhaps by "awesome" they do not necessarily mean "successful". The redesign is physically attractive, but "awesome" to me includes not only visual stimulation, but also success in creatively solving some problem or meeting some goal.

Drupal.com had a very good problem to solve: 30,000 unique visitors per month, most of whom were mistakenly typing "drupal.com" into...

Jul31

On Building a Personal Website

Creating a personal website is probably one of the most obvious, and necessary, things a Web Designer, or Developer, can do early in their career. It also happens to be hard.

Obviously, the technical, and physical means of creating a website are simple, even natural, to someone who does this sort of thing all day, every day for a paycheck. So, it is no hardship in that respect. The difficulty comes in finding the time. In finding the inspiration. In summoning the inherent narcissism that lies dormant within all of us; harnessing its powers to create a singular, totally self-indulgent work of art. Not to mention the stage-...