Thanks to everyone who helped to make the event happen. And happen it did.

A special note of appreciation to Shawn and UCSC and Zach and Stanford, and Will and Chapter Three,  and the amazing volunteers, and participants that made the prequel event something of note and the beginning of a promising future for Hi-Ed summits.

Thanks to all the presenters at both events. It was the sum of all participants at every level that made the event something of note for everyone, I hope.

While 1,500 people are  only a small number of the total base, as a sampling of the Drupal community, it was evenly split between biz/dev, themers, developers, and presenter/organizer/booth-people. There was a very small minority of users, or recent adopters this year compared to last and I felt the agre bracket was maybe a bit older compared to DrupalCon, but these are all impressions based on my own sampling of the sampling.

I’m left with mixed feelings about Dries’ “from product to industry” mantra, and questions of market dominance linger still.

Overall, I thought the event was stellar. My session went pretty well. I’m aiming to refine it and re-present in Toronto and New York. Maybe even Denver?

This post builds on the the already well documented concepts outlined in this blog post to provide additional details for a Snow Leopard, and handle some additional configurations for the 64-bit kernel. The previous post explains in detail how these technologies work, and provides screen shots to guide you in your configurations.

MacFUSE

The latest version of MacFUSE on the google code page is not compatible with the 64bit kernel. You need to download the 2.1.9 beta from this link.

SSHFS

Download the sshfs-static-leopard.gz from this wiki post and replace the sshfs-static executable in the MacFusion.app package.

To use sshfs from the command line, symlink the new binary to a location in your path, i.e.:

sudo ln -s /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/sshfs-static /usr/local/bin/sshfs

If MacFusion still refuses to complete a connection to a remote server, quit MacFusion, open up a terminal and:

$ cd /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/Resources/
$ mv sshnodelay.so sshnodelay.so.bak

source: http://rackerhacker.com/2009/08/28/fix-macfusion-on-snow-leopard/

LINKS

• How to manually compile svn checkout of MacFUES for the 64 bit kernel: http://www.5dollarwhitebox.org/drupal/node/97
• How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629

The site will act as both a portfolio and a database of my work and praxis. Eventually it will consume the parts of this blog that are art related, and the ideograph.biz will house posts related to my business.

I am hoping my site will be a prototype for even greater things to come, as I build out artist-centric tools and configurations on the drupal platform.

A little while back ideograph launched mollycrealock.com – a nice, attractive gallery for commercial Toronto photographer, Molly Crealock. It was a challenge to meet the requirements of automatic circular thumbnail generation and custom positioning.

The site also incorporates:

• private client galleries visible based on either user role or user names.
• Multiple simultaneous file uploads.
• Easy image captions and re-ordering of galleries through drag & drop.
• jQuery interface elements

You can see more screen shots of the work on ideograph.ca

You can use it to connect to your local MAMP and also to remote LAMP mysql servers (via SSH). Why is this so awesome?

Well, not only is it 100 times faster than that phpMyAdmin, but you can edit your DB super easily, like a spreadsheet. It is a snap to filter/search/order a table for viewing and editing.

Caveat emptor: what I am about to show you can do tremendous damage. You can accidentally kill your entire application, so BACK YOUR DATABASES UP! Test on a copy first.

You can do simple things like turn 1′s to 0′s and quickly disable a drupal module faster than drush can (but watch out if you don’t know your dependencies).

Edit your system table in Sequel Pro

I had this interesting and daunting problem:
I am working on this site for a soccer league that has a couple hundred teams and I realize that I need to modify a whole slew of node titles based on values that appear in their CCK fields.
Many of the Organic Group Group nodes (each team is a group)
Views Bulk Operations gets me part, but not all the way quickly enough for this one-time operation.

I’m not crafty enough to write a join and update statement across all these tables, but I do already have a view listing Teams and CCK fields for Division and Type.

Hey, if I scroll down to the bottom of the view, I can copy the query right from views into Sequel Pro!

Holy Moly. It just works. As it should.

Edit the result of a sequel statement created with views

Now I can just go down the list and edit my node titles.
Sweet.

Because there was a pattern here, I ended up using  the fabulous auto nodetitle module and tokens. I temporarliy added a pattern to the node titles of my team content type and used views bulk operations to update some of my node titles. After the update, i set the pattern to be used only if the title was blank.

Even though I solved my use case another way, I can see plenty of use for this technique in the future. Great way to fix typos in content, for example.

Commonly, users need to create subheadings in their posts. Markup should always be privileged over wrapping content in classes. For example, it is much better, both from a structural and a maintenance perspective, to use an h2 tag to create a title, rather than adding a class of, say, .title to a paragraph tag, then forcing the paragraph to look like an h2. It will make a mess of your stylesheet, plus render your site less accessible to screen readers and search engines.

It is most often advisable to create a new Input profile called “Rich Text” or “Graphical HTML Editor”, but we can also edit the “Full HTML” input format.

Our wysiwyg profiles will be listed at  [ /admin/settings/wysiwyg/profile ]  where we edit the profile to which we’ve assigned the TinyMCE editor. Under Buttons and plugins, we enable the following buttons:

1. HTML block format
2. Font style
3. Source code (not necessary, but useful for checking what we’ve done)

Under the CSS fieldset, we limit the number of block tags available, i.e.

  p,h2,h3,h4

and set the Editor CSS to use the theme CSS. By default, this will generate a lot list of classes from our theme’s style.css. Now, you can create a separate stylesheet just for the wysiwyg, but coordinating changes across them can be a hassle. Instead, we open up only a subset of the classes in our stylesheet using the CSS classes textarea, following the [title]=[class] format (this will seem familiar if you’ve ever used webform module):

  intro text=intro
  description text=description
  read more link=more-link

This is great because we can now provide a more meaningful list of styles to the user, and also a limited set of structural markup tags. The downside is that we have 2 dropdown lists and have to provide the tiniest bit of eduction.

I’m going to show you how to use phpMyAdmin to back up and restore MySQL databases. In my next post, I’ll show you how to graduate to doing the same thing using the command line.

I use MAMP to develop websites locally. I’ve written about this before here. The examples I’ll be showing come from the phpMyAdmin packaged with MAMP, but apply just as well to any other environment.

phpMyAdmin without the MAMP frame

First things first. Let’s work so we can see what we’re doing.I’m going to assume that you’re able to download and install MAMP or MAMP Pro on your own. The phpMyAdmin URL that you from the MAMP default webstart page gets you to the URL:

http://localhost/MAMP/frame.php?src=%2FphpMyAdmin%2F%3Flang%3Den-iso-8859-1&language=English

which looks gives you a framed version of the phpMyAdmin. The framing takes up a lot of screen real estate.

Instead, use http://localhost/phpMyAdmin and you’ll get something that looks much more pleasing:

dumping a database with phpMyAdmin

Select a database from the drop-down menu on the left hand side of phpMyAdmin. Or, Navigate to “home” by clicking the little house under the phpMyAdmin logo in the top left and hit the blue Databases link in the longish list there.

Ok, so now we see the tables in our database. Press the Export tab at the top. We’re going to export this database.

Let’s review the options you should select to get nice, compact, and legible SQL.

The first column, in the Export fieldset, is pretty straight forward. By default all the tables in your database will be selected. SQL is the format you want too.

“Disable foreign key checks” isn’t always necessary. I do a lot of CiviCRM work. Restoring a CiviCRM database will fail unless this option is enabled in your export.

“Add DROP TABLE / DROP VIEW” will delete your table on import before recreating it.

Extended inserts and Complete insterts gives you a smaller file and more compacted, easy to read view.

Click “Save as file” and use “gzipped” compression for the smallest files.

In the File name template, I add %D, which spits out today’s date. I add a little hypen before to seperate it from the database name and MAMP after, so I know it was a local dump and not from my live server. This format would give me a file like: mysql-06_02_09_MAMP.sql.gz

To restore your databse, click on the import tab, click the browse button, select your file, press go. I’ll spare you the screenshot.