The video for this presentation is online at Wireframes with Drupal In Mind

You can draw any kind of layout you want on paper but that doesn't mean you can accommodate that layout with the theme you are using. If you want to manage your design budget, create an opportunity for efficient page development, and ensure flexibility while you work to sustain your site, you need to plan your layout with your theme in mind.This session explores the basics of:

There is a Drupal module called Panels. There is a Drupal module called Context. There is a feature in Panels called context. Panel's context and the Context module are not the same, not even close. According to Earl Miles, the developer of Panels: "In Panels, context is lingo for a wrapper around any significant object. By default, Panels supports 'Node', 'Taxonomy term', 'Taxonomy vocabulary', and 'User' as contexts." But what does that mean?

I recently purchased "Drupal 6 Panels Cookbook" from Packt Publishing, hoping to get all my context/relationships questions answered. I did learn a couple things from the book so it wasn't money wasted. So I did what I often have to do, I starting clicking and observing what happens. This article is what I have figured out. I hope you find this useful.

Even if you aren't going to be the site builder, it is helpful to have some hands-on experience in Drupal so you can communicate productively with your Drupal planner, builders, themers, developers, etc. Drupal Hands-On Intro for Builders gives you insights into core Drupal features and the most commonly used contributed modules. You go from a simple site plan to a fully functional site in two days using features such as CCK, Views, Imagecache, Pathauto, and more.

I did a Google search recently to see how people were creating image galleries in Drupal. I found several options but none did what I needed. So I combined strategies offered by those who have shared before me and came up with a way to have two image gallery displays automatically appear on the gallery page AND allow images to belong to multiple galleries. Let's see how it's done.

In the past year, the letters UX have grown very popular in discussion posts, job ads, etc. UX design or user experience design can't be defined in a sentence. I found a definition of UX design on uxdesign.com @ http://uxdesign.com/ux-defined. As I read, the author of this article brings up the "profound and practical insights of Jesse James Garrett" and his diagram of The Elements of User Experience.

Have you ever needed to automatically create a URL with a structure like the one below?

There are a couple ways to accomplish this. The first step is to install the Pathauto and Tokens modules. You might need a couple more depending on which strategy you choose to use. Below are several strategies you can use to accomplish this requirement.

This is just a short lesson's learned I want to share regarding the decoupling of a multi-site Drupal installation. Some of you know that there is a site called http://groups.idcminnovations.com. What you wouldn't know is it has been running off the same Drupal installation as this site. Makes sense I suppose given it is a sub-domain of this site. On June 9th, 2010 I migrated a copy of this Drupal installation to a separate site on our server and redirect the groups server alias to its own Drupal installation. Sounds simple enough - it's been done before. When the copy was made, for some reason the .htaccess file content disappeared. You could see the file on the server but it was empty.

It's been a long time coming. I have just launched http://planningdrupalsites.com. I have been working on this book between gigs and trying to decide if it should be a site or a book. I have decided it will be a site. There are about 160 nodes (four chapters, tips, insights, and articles). on the site so far with many more in the hopper for this summer. Once the core chapters are posted, my plan is to open it to the community so others can contribute their lessons learned, tips, and tricks.