Trellon is closed today, Monday, January 18, 2010, in observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As holidays go in the United States, this is one that is frequently overlooked and few people stop to really appreciate. There has been great debate in many states as to whether to observe this day or Columbus Day should be observed as a holiday, given the impact it has on various calendars and the ends to which the men worked. It occurs the day before the birthday of Robert E. Lee, a confederate general who has received great acclaim despite the ideologies he fought for. It occurs in the month of January, overshadowed by New Years and the events that take place over the holidays.

Taking a moment to reflect on Dr. King and his accomplishments today is worthwhile, especially so for anyone who has ever worked on an open source project. Read More >>>

The forms Drupal automatically generates have always suffered from the 'silo' effect, where one form field is stacked on top of the other. This often presents a usability challenge for people operating the system, and generally requires some additional level of theming for developers in a really mature site.

Trellon recently released the interface module for Drupal, which is a stab at making it easier to change the look and feel of forms. Interface is a tool for authoring the interface for forms in Drupal by dragging and dropping form fields into predefined regions. This is one of those things you might need to see to see to understand - we have videos demonstrating the module at work.

These regions, the places on the page where you drop form fields, are put into something called a template. This article seeks to explain what a template file is and how to author your own. Our team has put a lot of effort into making it easy to use this module, and this includes authoring new templates. Interface ships with a number of templates we have already set up, and we understand it will be important for certain users to know how to author their own. Writing a template should be one of the simplest tasks you will ever have to do as a developer, right down there with Hello World and executing a print command. Read More >>>

It's been about a week since returning from Drupalcon Paris, and the consensus at Trellon is that we wish it never had to end. Many of the members of our team have been going to Drupalcons for a long time, and this was definitely one of the most memorable ones on record.

It was great getting to come out and support the community, and what a community it is these days! Being there, you got the sense of how much enthusiasm is building around Drupal, with so many people with different perspectives about what to do with the platform. While attendance was not as high as some previous events, that owed more to the venue than anything else, and you had the sense it made for a better experience. Read More >>>

Greetings from Drupalcon Paris!

Today, September 4, 2009, from 2:30 to 3:30, Trellon will be presenting a session with Gary Love of Hearst Digitial News to talk about 29-95.com. This web site is an interesting example of what you can do with Drupal in publishing, and we are going to be providing a case study of how it came together, the technology behind it, and some of the business challenges the Houston Chronicle faced in conceptualizing and deploying the site. You can expect to receive slides and notes from the session on trellon.com afterwards. Michael Haggerty, Trellon's CEO and Chief Internet Strategist, and Marc Ingram, Trellon's Technical Lead, will be speaking along with Gary as part of the session. Read More >>>

The CMS Expo Learning and Business conference is coming up this week in Evanston, Illinois. This event is going to be interesting, in part because I will be presenting (more on that below), but also because the session track really covers a lot of bases.

The event is promoted as "Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco & Plone CMS Training," but that only does it partial justice. Looking at the home page, there is this whole CMS Support Training track going on, and there is a lot to learn from the people that are going to be there. Beyond the big names like Apache, MySQL and PHP, there are going to be some other interesting topics worth hearing about. Read More >>>