tl;dr: conference, book, Twedding, Drupal North East, new logo, conference, birthday, new company, conference, birthday, Christmas.

January

It’s nice to have been able to start the year off with a trip down to Nottingham for the New Adventures Conference. There was probably an intercourse-load of snow around, too.

February

Definitive Guide to Drupal 7 book

All my calendar reminds me about in February is work, a lot of it seemingly involving technically reviewing Apress’ Definitive Guide to Drupal 7.

March

I witnessed my first (and, to this day, last) Twitter wedding between @philsherry and @li_sherry.

April

We held the first Drupal North East event at The Bridge Hotel in Newcastle (coincidentally, after talking to Adam Hill at DIBI), which has been running monthly ever since.

Drupal North East user group

May

Peacock Carter logo

Time for a new look for Peacock Carter. Meet Eric, the peacock.

June

Another month, another conference: this time, on my doorstep. The increasingly awesome (and I mean that in the literal sense of the word: the event has become awe-inspiring in the short time it’s been around) Design It Build It conference in Newcastle (well, Gateshead) with the chance to see Zeldman and a host of other talent speak, 20 minutes walk from my flat. Oh, and lots of beer, and pizza.

And Peacock Carter moved offices in to central Newcastle. The week the lift in our new building decided to die.

July

Between the usual British summer rain showers, I spoke at SuperMondays on the topic of ‘Design/CMS integration’.

August

Another year, another birthday. Can’t remember what I did this year, so must have been good!

September

I finally got around to registering Richard Carter Consultancy Ltd as a company, to enable me to start separating the open source consultancy services Peacock Carter offers in to a new entity for simplicity’s sake. Simplicity for my clients’ sake, rather than my bookkeeper’s or the taxman’s sake, that is.

October

October was immensely enjoyable for me, what with the excellent Front Row Conference in Krakow (and an opportunity for me to excite bore a room of people on the topic of open source software theming), as well as meeting the likes of recent Glaswegian convert Rich Quick, Rudy Rigot, and a lot of Polish guys and girls who insisted on buying the beer all night, every night.

November

Another birthday: this time, Peacock Carter’s 5th birthday. Cake, champagne and beer may have been enjoyed in various quantities in an order I have yet to remember (there were definitely balloons).

December

All I seem to remember is a month of Christmas parties, for the Young Entrepreneurs Trust, Peacock Carter, Durham Business Club and various other things I attend. I never want to see a mince pie again (give me 11 months)./h2

The offer pizzas, with a selection of ‘gourmet’ toppings – you can get parma ham, goats cheese and other unusual, middle-class toppings – as well as gourmet burgers, onion rings and ‘proper’ chips. Their menu is online.

Posh takeaway; unposh prices

And yet, their pizzas are still about half the price of equivalents at Domino’s or Papa John’s, and made with more care than I expect the chain pizza takeaways to make!

And yes, I know ‘unposh’ isn’t a real word, but if Shakespeare can make up words, so can I.

Beware, though – they advertise their opening hours as 6pm – 4am everyday, and yet they almost certainly don’t stick to them during the week – they actually seem to close around 12am or 1am during the week. Not that I blame them; a bit on the ambitious side to keep up 7 days a week!

They’ve got a website at gourmet2go.co.uk, though it’s fairly poor (text as images, anyone?), but not poor enough to put me off their pizzas.

I’ve been playing this afternoon, and have created Peacock Carter Ltd’s Google+ page as a playground. You can create your own Google+ page at plus.google.com/pages/create.

It looks like pages in Google+ are treated very much like they are in Facebook, in terms of their ability to interact with individual profiles in Google+; i.e., it’s fairly limited (you’re only able to interact with an account as a page once that account has you in one or more circles).

The only snagging point I’ve found so far is that switching between my individual Google+ account and the page isn’t quite as smooth as it appears in Facebook at the moment – I can easily change back from the page to my own profile, but haven’t found an easy way to switch from my own Google+ profile back to the page at this point.

Next stop: seeing how Google+ copes with multiple pages.

Edit:  page management in Google Plus

Aha, I’ve discovered the trick to switching between pages in Google Plus: it hides the drop-down list until you click your profile’s name in the top-left of the screen. From there, you’ll text along the lines of ’2 pages’, and you can click this and select the relevant page from a drop-down.

Book of CSS3 by Peter Gasston

The book

The book is sold as ‘a developer’s guide to the future of web design‘; a (perhaps acceptable?) bit of marketing guff, since you can use everything in the book now – it just won’t work in certain browsers, yet. The obligatory chapter list is pasted below from the publisher’s website for The Book of CSS3:

• Chapter 1: An Overview of CSS3
• Chapter 2: Media Queries
• Chapter 3: DOM and Attribute selectors
• Chapter 4: Pseudo Classes and Pseudo Elements
• Chapter 5: Web Fonts
• Chapter 6: Text Effects and Typographic Styles
• Chapter 7: Multiple Columns
• Chapter 8: Background Images and Other Decorative Properties
• Chapter 9: Border and Box Effects
• Chapter 10: Color and Opacity
• Chapter 11: Gradients
• Chapter 12: 2D Transformations
• Chapter 13: Transitions and Animations
• Chapter 14: 3D Transformations
• Chapter 15: Flexible Box Layout
• Chapter 16: Template Layout
• Chapter 17: The Future of CSS
• Appendix A: Browser Support
• Appendix B: Online Resources

One of my initial concerns with the book was it’d cover techniques I already knew (most of the books I buy, read and review are more software-specific), but I managed to learn a couple of very useful and previously entirely alien techniques (matrix3d being one). The book also clarified my understanding of some existing CSS. Retrospectively, this is what I would have expected to have get out of reading the book.

The good

Peter’s also put a huge effort in to the companion website for the book, thebookofcss3.com, but that’s not too much of a surprise if you consider he’s a contributor to css3.info too.

The book is extremely thorough; from accessibility concerns to z-axis and ‘zebra striping for tables‘. The book’s index is equally thorough, reinforcing its usefulness as a reference book and just a one-off read.

The CSS and HTML snippets throughout the book are nice and clear, and well explained. I’m particularly keen on the way proprietary attributes (e.g., -o-border-radius) are (generally) omitted from code snippets, which allows you to see the general gist of the CSS without wading through lines of duplicate attributes.

Proprietary attributes are explained in subsequent sections of the chapter, which is especially useful given the discrepancies and inconsistencies between implementations (particularly, I must say, between Mozilla and Webkit implementations). For this in particular, the book is a good go-to resource. The screenshots are also clear throughout the book – a rare achievement for a black-and-white book which deserves some kudos itself.

One of my favourite ‘features’ of the book is the ‘browser support’ section at the end of each chapter, which contains an overview of (surprisingly), the browser support for the various attributes covered within the chapter; an invaluable resource for future reference, again.

A thanks to the publishers, No Starch, too, for their incredibly swift response to my request for an image of the book cover. It was a matter of hours, rather than days, when it can take some publishers a matter of weeks, or even months, to respond!

The bad

I did have one negative; the printed book is entirely black and white, (though you can get the ebook in full colour, obviously). As I said, this isn’t as much of a problem with example screenshots as you’d think, since the examples are very carefully put together to avoid most issues with colour contrast.

And, best of all – I certainly didn’t find any gripes I could classify as ‘ugly’.

The Book of CSS3; overall impression

I’m incredibly impressed with the The Book of CSS3, from the enviable, concise style of writing to the sheer thoroughness of the topics covered, and the clear, consistently presented examples. I’d say it’s a worthwhile buy even more for experienced front-end developers (and, dare I say it, a necessary buy for any back-end developer?).

URL for sharing is http:///bit.ly/frontrowtalk.

The talk is going to be along the same lines as my recent SuperMondays talk, though I’ll be (almost) fully rewriting it and updating the content with totally new examples, if only to spare my sanity.

They’ve got a great line-up of speakers (besides me, obviously), including Bruce Lawson and Patrick Lauke (browser superheroes for an Opera fan like me), and some intriguing talks (‘HTML5 as a Gaming Console: Is It Possible?’ by Michał Budzyński looks like my favourite so far).

Simply, the project incorporated a redesign of Equality South West’s existing website, and redevelopment of their fairly substantial member database, knowledgebase and online events-booking system, which we built on Peacock Carter’s own CMS.

About Equality South West

I’ve embedded a YouTube video about them below (see Equality South West’s YouTube channel for more), partly because it gets straight to the point of what they do, but also because it was the informal, all-inclusive style of this video which inspired the design the client decided upon. The puerile me liked it because he got to pretend to ‘design’ whilst creating stickman battle scenes.

They were also a great client to work for, responsive to our ideas, and willing to bend to the limitations and freedom the web presents, and, oddly enough, I’ve not met any of the team at Equality South West in person! There’s a more detailed case study of the Equality South West project and all it entailed over on Peacock Carter’s website.

You can see the new website at equalitysouthwest.org.uk.

• Chapter 1: Learning the Basics of Drupal Theming
• Chapter 2: Working with the Default Configuration and Display Options
• Chapter 3: Understanding PHPTemplate Themes
• Chapter 4: Using Intercepts and Overrides
• Chapter 5: Customizing an Existing Theme
• Chapter 6: Creating a New Theme
• Chapter 7: Dynamic Theming
• Chapter 8: Dealing with Forms
• Chapter 9: Overcoming Common Challenges in Drupal Theming
• Chapter 10: Useful Extensions for Themers
• Appendix: Identifying Templates, Stylesheets, and Themable Functions

Drupal, for those who have had their heads stuck in the sand for the last few years, is one the world’s most popular open source content management systems/frameworks, with websites such as the White House, Sony and MTV using Drupal to support their. Drupal 7 provides a drastic change and improvement from Drupal 6, not just in terms of theming but with an substantial overhaul of the administration panel.

Content of the book

Drupal 7 Themes, as you can see from the table of contents above, covers a lot of content over its 299 or so pages. As someone used to theming for Drupal 6 (and that was quite some time ago!), Drupal 7 was quite a sidewards step in terms of theming

The book’s also proven useful for Nathan, a beginner to Drupal, who’s been working on an internship through Sunderland University for the Young Entrepreneurs Trust website, for which the next iteration is based on Drupal 7: it’s been a great point of reference for both of us as we’ve worked towards getting the new website up and running!

Style of the book

The book is written in Packt’s usual informal style, with easy-to-follow steps for each task covered in the book. Due to the nature of Drupal theming, Drupal 7 Themes requires the reader to have some basic PHP knowledge alongside HTML/CSS, although PHP is typically fairly well described throughout where necessary.

Overall impressions of Drupal 7 Themes

The book is pretty thorough in covering most content I, as a themer, would want to see about Drupal. No time is wasted in covering the basics of HTML/CSS (these are assumed, and rightly so).

Some of the most useful chapters in the book for me were Customizing (sic) An Existing Theme (an improvement on what documentation/guides are currently available online, as far as I could see) and Creating a New Theme, although at between 20 and 25 pages per chapter, I felt more ground could have been covered here, particularly in giving more detailed information about the use of sub themes and live examples of these. Chapter 10, Useful Modules for Themers, was also a highlight for me: I suspect what I learnt from this chapter alone will save me quite a bit of time in future Drupal-based projects I work on.

I feel the book let itself down in the indexing of content: when using it as a reference point I found it nearly impossible to track down what I was after in the index and resorted to the table of contents instead. Some of the tasks also suffer from a lack of screenshots clarifying where you should be in terms of progress towards specific goals, but nothing to the extent that the book is useless, thankfully.

Disclosure

A little disclosure, as always: Packt offered me a paperback copy of this book (worth £27.99 / $44.99 – hardly bank-breaking!) in exchange for this review. As with previous reviews, though, I’ve spoken my mind on the content and the way the content is covered.

1. Introduction
   1. Creative Director at Peacock Carter Ltd, a Newcastle-based web design agency
   2. Author of 4 books in theming:
      1. Magento 1.3 and Magento 1.4
      2. MediaWiki
      3. Joomla! 1.5
   3. Technical reviewer on more:
      1. Drupal 7 (x2)
      2. MediaWiki
      3. Inkscape
   4. Experience with below too:
      1. ModxCMS
      2. Drupal
      3. WordPress
2. What is theming?
   1. Taking a static template – (X)HTML/CSS, possibly JavaScript – and integrating that in to a specific software package – a CMS, ecommerce package
   2. To me, it bridges the gap between web designer, frontend developer and, sometimes, a little towards backend developer too
3. Topics to promote discussion throughout the rest of this talk. Base themes:
   1. Concept, as seen in Magento
      1. Base theme encapsulates everything needed for the software (e.g., ecommerce) to ‘run’ visually
      2. Then create an overwrite theme which overwrites specific elements you want to customise
      3. Good for upgrades – you can upgrade the core components of the software – base themes included, probably – and in the worse case scenario only have to rewrite your changes to the base theme
4. Base themes II
   1. Examples of ‘base theme’ implementations
      1. MediaWiki: common.css – single stylesheet you import you defines style for common elements – e.g., user bar, page tools
      2. WordPress – ‘base’ themes such as ‘Starkers’ by Elliot Jay Stocks – but these are more for copying and pasting than overwriting
      3. Magento – the ‘truist’ base theme implementation I’ve seen
5. Abstraction
   1. I want to see as little logic as possible in  template files (sort of). Why? It helps themers focus on mark-up rather than the intricacies of where a particular block of content is coming from
   2. What follows are examples of how various open source CMS/ecommerce/etc platforms implement something as simple as populating the <title> element
6. WordPress example
   1. No! Just nasty
7. MediaWiki example
   1. Getting better – my designer sensibilities aren’t too offended by this
8. ModxCMS example
   1. A good balance?
   2. Separated parameters for the site name and the title of the page – you can reorder them as required
   3. But, is this our choice as themers, or the end users’ choice?
9. Joomla!example
   1. Navigation is in this block, somewhere
   2. Gives the user more control
10. Magento
    1. Similar to the Joomla! example, defined elsewhere.
    2. Can overwrite through XML layout files – and remove/add stylesheets/scripts
11. So, I said as little logic as possible, but I’m also awkward.
12. Whilst I don’t want logic as a themer, I do want choice: the ability to change how data is formatted if a particular element of the theme is better suited to it
13. Granularity in theming can provide abstracted control to themers for this very purpose, and it can be done without resorting to huge amounts of logic
    1. How many people have themed/tried theming? How many people have got 95% complete with a theme, only to find that the last 5% they need to change is nearly impossible? E.g., to add your own custom id to an element within a predefined element which can be hardcoded in a block of output HTML
    2. (Of the people who put their hands up for the first question, all hands remained up for the latter)
    3. As an example, let’s look at how various systems implement populating the navigation
14. MediaWiki example
    1. (For those wondering, the Sky Sports style pint glass meant we were halfway to beer at the Trent House)
    2. This doesn’t give us enough control
15. MediaWiki example (II)
    1. But luckily, MediaWiki outputs the list items with (semi)unique ids assigned to them
16. ModxCMS example
    1. A contained block, with little control here…
    2. …but the bottom code block can be used in a template to overwrite the predefined output and append a unique class/id to the list item
    3. A good balance – sensible defaults with the option to overwrite them if required?
17. Drupal example
    1. Similar to Modx; can be overwritten in a template file
18. So, where do we draw the line in what a themer should define, and what a user should be able to define? The simple answer: who knows? It depends on the:
    1. project itself
    2. the technical ability of the end-users of the CMS/ecommerce system/etc
    3. the client’s budget (doesn’t it always!)
19. Drupal 6 example:
    1. Generated output from Drupal 6 module ‘panels’, courtesy of @philsherry
       1. 22 nested <div>s! Possibly to make it ‘robust’ to theme…but it’s <div> overload
       2. Duplicated classes within nested <div>s (e.g., .inner)
20. Drupal 6 example (II)
    1. Software automatically adds a class of .first, .last for the relevant list item in the navigation block
    2. There’s also overlap in how we as designers can control things.
21. …because we can control the style here through CSS such as this
22. The CMS problem
    1. We create nice mark-up for our clients’ sites, only to have it destroyed by output from Rich Text Editors (RTE)
    2. Jeremy Keith at DIBI 2011 (Design It Build It conference) summed this up nicely as WYSIWTF (What You See Is What The Fuck)
23. Here’s an example from a website using TinyMCE: nested <span>s, <font> (!) and even nested <p>s?!
24. And they overwrite our style inline, too. Is this too much choice for the client? I would say yes!
25. Portability
    1. Ability to port theme/template/skin from one software to another (e.g. Joomla! to Drupal), or even between software versions (e.g., Drupal 6 to Drupal 7)
    2. Magento 1.3 to 1.4 – forum post which says ‘start again’!
    3. An ideal that’s unlikely to ever be reached. Plus, it’d put themers out of a job!
26. Documentation
    1. Problem in open- and closed-source systems
    2. This is an example from Magento’s website. Very long page…and nowhere does it say it’s largely irrelevant to the most recent version of Magento!
    3. But then they are starting to sell guides on everything Magento
27. Documentation II
    1. Example from the WordPress Codex; well integrated wiki – you can correct mistakes, add to it from your experience.
    2. Magento has a wiki, but it’s poorly integrated
28. Few things I could have gone in to more detail about:
    1. Layout control
       1. What’s the best way to define and control different page layouts? Again, is it the themer’s or end-user’s choice?
       2. What’s the best way to control widgets and changing where they appear on different pages, if required?
       3. I think the answer is it depends who the client is (and their budget, of course)
    2. Scalability
       1. ‘Future proof’ themes
       2. What happens if your client decides to install a module; is at least the basic styling for that covered by your theme?
          1. Base themes come in here, to some extent
          2. Some systems (e.g., Drupal), simply import another stylesheet with a module, if required
29. Plug for Drupal North East