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The folks at pingVision have posted their case study for the Popular Science Magazine website on drupal.org.

Jeff Miccollis and Young Hahn with DevelopmentSeed gave an excellent presentation at DrupalCon 2008 titled: Creating Custom Workflows for Drupal Apps: taking advantage of core hooks and context. The primary focus of this session was explaining the various methods of maintaining "context" throughout a Drupal site.

Addison Berry from Lullabot has posted the slides from his DrupalCon 2008 presentation: Contributing to Drupal: A guide for everyone.

Woot!

John VanDyk, author of Pro Drupal Development, and longtime Drupal developer/guru, has posted the slides and video of the presentation he gave at DrupalCon on triggers and actions. It was great presentation from one of Drupal's founding fathers. Though centered around Drupal 6, many of the basic principals can be applied to Drupal 5's Actions module.

Session: From Drupal Newbie to Drupal Ninja
Time: 9:00am (EST) 03/03/2008
Presenter: Chad Williams (hunmonk)

This presentation was targeted primarily at the Drupal newbie, and was mostly a "tips & tricks" session. Here are my notes from the session:

Just in time for the BBQ's, fireworks, and swimming- here's a list of ten links that I gathered up with a little something for everyone. Enjoy.

If you work in a web design or development firm, then you are probably already very (if not too) familiar with the various idiosyncrancies across the major browsers. Even before you start to apply the stylesheets you can spot noticable differences in the way the browsers render the html. This is because the major browsers come with a default stylesheet they use to render html when nothing else is available. It is a very simple stylesheet, mainly affecting paragraphs, headings, links, and fonts. This is why, without any styling, unvisited links appear blue with an underline, among other things. While using links is a trivial example, small differences in font sizes and paragraph margins can become a headache and can cause you to start adding unnecessary fluff to your well crafted stylesheets. There are some techniques you can utilize to minimize the damage, or what we in the industry refer to as browser normalization.

Nifty Corners Cube is a javascript library written by Alessandro Fulciniti that enables you to easily implement rounded corners on your page. There are many different utilities out there on the web that do basically the same thing, but you'll be hard pressed to find one that does it any easier.

If you have ever attempted to implement rounded corners in your markup and css, you'll find that your markup quickly becomes riddled with presentational divs, loads of images, and the css seems to be playing the role of a bar bouncer. It's even worse if the content box you have rounded needs to be fluid in any direction.

Anyone that has written HTML and CSS has undoubtedly, at one time or another, faced a major headache attempting to acheive crossbrowser display uniformity. It's a problem that's not going to go away anytime soon, so we all just have to live with it for the time being.

I've noticed over the years, that everyone has a different approach to tackling this issue. Some prefer to use multiple stylesheets, one always for IE, the other for everyone else. Some code one stylesheet, but forsake uniformity for subtle, sometimes unnoticable, differences. I myself have used both of these techniques in the past. Not that there is anything wrong with either method; the end goal is to have a webpage that looks roughly the same in all the major browsers (IE 5-6, Firefox, Opera, Safari), and most importantly, without using tables for layout.

Installation

Virtuemart:

• <5 minutes (if you have a working installation of Joomla, <10 minutes otherwise).
• Installs as a module for Joomla. Click upload & install from module installer pane, and viola!
• Package comes with two Joomla components, two mambots, and several plug-in modules that offer added functionality (i.e. minicart, top 10 products list).
• Includes sample data for a demo store.
• Uses Joomla's admin interface for store administration

osCommerce:

• <10 minutes.
• Includes sample data for a demo store.
• Comes with admin interface.