katbailey.net

Drupal Camp Vancouver '08 was a roaring success and I enjoyed it enormously. There was a really interesting crowd at the event, with people from Seattle, Victoria, even as far away as Saskatoon and parts of Alberta. It was an amazing opportunity for networking and just getting to know more of the local (and obviously not-so-local) Drupal scene.

In March I attended my first DrupalCon and next weekend I will experience my first Drupal Camp - right here in Vancouver. OK, so it won't be quite the grand affair that DrupalCon Boston was, but there are lots of interesting talks lined up and it will be great to meet more of the local Drupalers. Some of the sessions that have caught my eye so far include "Building Community with Organic Groups", "Intro to Panels 2" and the session on the Forms API.

I've been working with Marco Carbone of Advomatic on a powerful content scheduling module. Marco originally built Slot Machine for FastCompany.com and it proved such a powerful tool for organising content display it was obvious that contributing it to the community was the next step. As its name suggests, the module allows you to 'slot' content into different queues according to topics, which come from a particular vocabulary, and define the update frequency for each slot in each topic.

I gave an introductory presentation on jQuery to the Vancouver League of Drupallers the week before DrupalCon Boston. It covered the basics of the jQuery framework and an explanation of how to use it in Drupal. Here is the slideshare of the presentation:

But of course at DrupalCon I was bombarded with new ideas about using jQuery, especially in Drupal 6. One of the main to-dos on my list since returning from Boston is to get up to speed on things like Drag and Drop, AHAH, the jQuery UI plugin in general and all the new ways that jQuery is being implemented in contrib modules. And who knows... maybe a jQuery presentation Part 2 will come of it...

I finally got over my "just one more tweak..." attempt at perfectionism and decided to release quicktabs properly. Yes, there are still features that need to be added, in particular better editing flexibility for existing quicktabs blocks. But the main functionality is there and there don't seem to be any serious bugs. And people want it! So here it is: http://drupal.org/project/quicktabs

And the blurb from the project page, in case you don't want to go there just now, that explains what it does:

The Quick Tabs module allows you to create blocks of tabbed content, specifically views and blocks. You can create a block on your site containing up to six tabs with corresponding content. Clicking on the tabs makes the corresponding content display instantly (it uses jQuery). The content for each tabbed section can be either a view or an existing block. It is an ideal way to do something like the Most Popular / Most Emailed stories tabs you see on many news websites.

Once created, the Quick Tabs blocks show up in your block listing, ready to be configured and enabled like other blocks.

Multiple Quick Tabs blocks can be placed on a single page.

For theming of the tabs, 9 styles have been provided for you to choose from, along with the default option of no style, if you prefer to add your own theming instead.