CivicActions Team DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 Sessions – Vote Now

CivicActions is really excited to be a Silver Sponsor of DrupalCon San Francisco this year, and beyond our sponsorship, we’re hoping to enrich everyone’s experience with a variety of sessions proposed by our team members.  Take a few minutes to check out out this awesome lineup of session proposals. We’ve got sessions for the hard core engineering types like Owen’s Drush Speed Tour, Sumit and Aaron’s Developing Apps for Iphone and Android Using Drupal Based Systems and Stella’s Coder Module: Easily Port Modules to Drupal 7. For project managers and technical project managers we have proposed sessions like Owen’s Leading Technical Project Teams and a panel Aaron proposed on Managing Virtual Drupal Teams For non profit and advocacy organizations looking for more information about how they may use Drupal, or how to find a shop that can build their project Aaron has proposed How Advocacy Organizations Can Lever the Power Of Drupal, True Love: How to Find the Right Drupal Shop for Your Project. Jenn has proposed a session with one of our clients, EPA.net  Open Source Opens Doors: Youth Professional Non Profit Foundation Collaboration. And for a rapid-fire survey of the best in world-changing Drupal sites, Ian has proposed a head-spinning one hour tour, Drupal For Good: 50 Examples of Drupal Actually Changing the World. I’ve proposed Ignite DrupalCon, an Ignite session consisting of 10 5-minute, 20 slide talks by people from all over the Drupal Community about diverse topics.  Ignite’s slogan is “Enlighten us, but make it quick.” Slides are timed to auto advance every 15 seconds.  Ignite events have taken place all over the world. I...

WYSIWYG Tips And Tricks

WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors can be tricky to configure properly, and most clients have to have them, for good reason too, who wants to hand code html?  In this short post I’ll explain a few tips and tricks to get your WYSIWYG configuration dialed in. For starters you will want the following modules installed WYSIWYG API & your editor of choice (like TinyMCE or CK Editor) WYSIWYG Filter allows you more flexibility that HTML filter for allowing and dissalowing html and style tags. This was the missing component for me, and one who’s absense prevented indenting, outdenting and image alignment from working properly. Better Formats (optional) allows you to set default input formats for different content types and different roles.  This is critical if you have many different levels of users and want the default input format to be different for each role (eg authenticated users have filtered html, staff have full html by default) IMCE & IMCE WYSIWYG Editor Bridge (optional) if you want inline image insertion with the ability to resize images, this pair of modules is essential. The configuration for each module mentioned above is pretty straight forward, but a few things that could hang you up the first time are: The syntax for allowing html and style tags in WYSIWYG filter is different than in HTML Filter, and i found it confusing.  Here is what I allowed: a[!href|target<_blank|title], div[align<center?justify?left?right], p[align<center?justify?left?right], img[src|id|width|height|align|hspace|vspace], br,span,em,strong,cite,code,blockquote,ul,ol,li,dl,dt,dd,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,u,p, @[class|style] The important thing to note is that each line must end with a comma! The only line I had to add was the one for images, and...

Upgrading CiviCRM from 2.x to 3.x Tips And Tricks

I recently upgraded CiviCRM for one of our clienst from 2.1.4 to 3.0.4 and learned a few tips that I’ll share.  In most cases you just need to be sure to follow the instructions that CiviCRM provides and make all the intermediate upgrades along the way.  But In doing so, I ran into some frustrating problems, but through perseverence, ingenuity, and most important;y awesome support from Fen, Alex and Galaxy, I got around the problems and got the site upgraded. So here is what you should look our for: First, do everything that CiviCRM’s Documentation recommends (like backing up your database, turn off all civicrm related module in drupal etc…). Turn off FastCGI if you are running it, you do this in your .htaccess file by commenting out the line for ‘AddHandler fcgid-script .php’. Enable debugging and backtrace (you do this at http://example.com/civicrm/admin/setting/debug?reset=1) Ensure that your resource urls are all set right (you do this at http://example.com/civicrm/admin/setting/url?reset=1) Remove the contents of the templates_c directory (~/sites/example.com/files/civicrm/templates_c) Clear your browser cache and website cache for good measure Then run your upgrade, remember if you are going from 2.1.x to 3.x you need to upgrade to 2.2.x first. I recommend taking a backup at that point. So there you have it, a few tips on making your CiviCRM upgrade experience go more smoothly!...

More Drupal Training Opportunities And A Look Back

Our friends at Chapter 3 recently launched a training program and just announced a new round of trainings in San Francisco in February.  As Dries Buytaert has pointed out, with the growth of Drupal, and the increasing demand for Drupal development and site building services it is essential that more people learn to build websites with Drupal. As Dries notes, it is not just Chapter 3, but Lullabot organized the second Do It With Drupal seminar in December and is also hiring more teachers, the number of Drupal books available continues to increase, and the upcoming DrupalCon in San Francisco promises to offer a wealth of training opportunities. If you’re interested in learning more about building websites with Drupal, I am sure that Chapter 3’s ucoming trainings are a great place to get an imersion experience. In other news: following the successful Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in October 2009 held in Seattle (which I helped organize and CivicActions sponsored), it is exciting to note that The Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit will move to Vancouver, BC in October of 2010. Just 4 years ago this month CivicActions, along with Zach Rosen, began planning one of the first Drupal “Boot Camps”, with Jeff Robbins from Lullabot leading the instruction.  This was before Lullabot was a leader in the Drupal training business, before Chapter 3 came into existence.  Before there ever was a DrupalCamp.  In four years we have come so far as a community. DrupalCamps are happening regularly all over the world, many of them larger than the DrupalCon held 4 years ago in Vancouver in conjunction with the Open Source...