be the change you want to see in the world

Not new, but new to me.

Sometimes when you buy property they construct a big building in front of your view and the value of your investment decreases. Other times, they demolish a big obstacle and you are left with a million-dollar view that pays a huge return on your initial investment. This is what has happened with Drupal. Those of us who invested time and effort in learning Drupal in the past are now being rewarded as the community delivers more and more powerful functionality.

Case in point: the Views Module pioneered by merlinofchaos was recently upgraded to include a Views Theme Wizard. This is a genius bit of programming that implodes a big obstacle for Drupal site builders. From the instructions that come up when you click the Theme Wizard tab in the Views admin interface:

The views theming wizard generates code that you can use in your phptemplate theme to help you customize the output of a view. Simply select a theme and it will generate code for your template.php as well as template files for the individual views.

At this time this code assumes your view is a list type view! It may not generate effective code for other types of views. Future versions of this program will be smarter, and give more options, but this wizard is still a huge start.

This works for every view, so even if you have cloned 100 views from the same parameters, they can all have a different look and feel based on easy edits to the view’s Theme which is generated by the wizard. It might look a little scary at first, but just play around with it on a test site. Make changes and watch the effect. You will get it, and when you do, working with Drupal will never be the same.

If you build websites with Drupal and you are not yet using the Views Module, please check it out and support the development by sending in bug reports and feature requests. This is one sweet piece of technology that helps puts Drupal over the top in terms of flexibility and function for content display.

veritydrives

Originally uploaded by ecstaticist.

Had a fun day driving around looking at properties for sale in Victoria today. We concentrated on Rock Heights and View Royal. I really like the Gorge waterfront. Can’t afford any of them, but it was fun, and Verity took over the driving for a while…

I would like to draw everyone’s attention to a wonderful music festival being organised by a friend of mine, Christopher Donison. It is call Music by the Sea, and it takes place at Bamfield, BC.

Bamfield is a beautiful little community on the west coast of Vancouver Island. You can get there by water taxi, float plane and logging road. There are several transportation packages available.

If you are looking for something that will change your life, a music festival on the west coast of Vancouver Island is a good start.

Read this if you are able. This blog will now fall silent for a while…

At nearly 2 pm, we received some terrible news. We lost a good friend in the killings. T. was a 26-year-old civil engineer who worked with a group of friends in a consultancy bureau in Jadriya. The last time I saw him was a week ago. He had stopped by the house to tell us his sister was engaged and he’d brought along with him pictures of latest project he was working on- a half-collapsed school building outside of Baghdad.

He usually left the house at 7 am to avoid the morning traffic jams and the heat. Yesterday, he decided to stay at home because he’d promised his mother he would bring Abu Kamal by the house to fix the generator which had suddenly died on them the night before. His parents say that T. was making his way out of the area on foot when the attack occurred and he got two bullets to the head. His brother could only identify him by the blood-stained t-shirt he was wearing.