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Metal Toad University #10: Real Time Word Press

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

In this episode our intrepid adventurers embarked on a quest to install WordPress. I have to admit, this was quite easy and didn't take nearly as long I expected it would. Since I was also new to WordPress, we explored together. We went through the process of downloading and installing it, setting up the database, and selecting a theme. Along the way we talk about other concepts as they come up like using Lorem Ipsum placeholder text, using rsync to transfer files, and using command line MySQL. Next week we hope to talk about WordPress theming, but that will depend on if I can get a guest speaker on it or not. If we don't talk about that, we'll do a sample PHP application and talk about basic database work. Here's the video: Read More…

Metal Toad University #9: Going Live

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

This week we took our site live, but before we did that one of our students Lewis Notestine had created a new theme for our site: Space! We used Git version control to merge his changes into ours, then made a few modifications to the triggers and our new theme was in place. We then bought a domain name from NameCheap.com and fumbled around with DNS settings. By the end of the class, we still couldn't see our site, but that was due to DNS propagation taking forever and a missing symlink. Once those things were corrected we were able to go to beekandbrooke.com to visit our site. Here's the movie: Read More…

Metal Toad University #8: The Wolf Theme

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

This session had us finding new images to create a new theme for our site. Once our new wolf images and patterns were created and exported, we went about with the theming. I added one class to the HMTL: wolf. Then we found the styles that were specifying images and copied them to a new location in our CSS and prefixed them with the wolf class. That made this: Read More…

Metal Toad University #7: First Site Done!

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

Want to join Metal Toad University? Join the Google+ Page. Our 8th class was all about finishing the one page scrolling web page that we started on a few classes back. We had a some more styling to do and that wasn't surprising because most of the work on a simple web page is styling. Right off the bat I did some minor styling tweaks that made the page shadow flow around the entire page and I changed it's color by modifying the box-shadow property. Then we worked on the main content body and added a semi-transparent white to the box behind it. This gave the text more contrast and made it easier to read. Read More…

Metal Toad University #6: Gets Spooky

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

Want to join Metal Toad University? Join the Google+ Page. Read More…

Metal Toad University #5: The Gathering

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

OMG, no video! For shame! We had some technical difficulties (read: Dan was a doofus), so there was no audio on the video. So while you could watch it, it probably wouldn't be that helpful. Sorry! But here's what we did: This class was where we finally started putting everything together to work on an actual site: Beek and Brooke's Bloody Bash. This is my annual Halloween party and an easy target for a fun little demo site. First we downloaded an HTML5 Boilerplate template from http://html5boilerplate.com/ that we used as a base. This is a great template that includes a lot of little helpers that help your site perform well, as well as look good on older browsers. Read More…

Metal Toad University - Class #4: JavaScript!

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

Want to catch up with Metal Toad University? Go through the previous classes here! The fourth class we held was an intro to JavaScript (JS), guest hosted by Robbie Ferrero. Robbie gave us a great presentation on what JS is and how to use it. We covered the basics like what a variable is and what a function is. At the end, I demoed a small piece of code that I wrote during that class. It allowed me to demonstrate some JS in action. Read More…

Metal Toad University: Class 3

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

For the rest in the Metal Toad University Series, Click Here. This was a fun class as we talked about CSS, which IMO, is one of the most pleasurable parts of web development. Styling is what everyone sees when they go to your site so it can be viewed as one of the most important steps too. Read More…

Second Class of MTU

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

If you missed our first class, you can read up and watch the video here. We completed the second class of Metal Toad University last Thursday. It focused on tools that we'll use to create sites including text editors and graphics programs, and then we went down a list of HTML elements and talked about each one. Well, most of them. We skipped the blink tag and a few others. Read More…

Site Building at DrupalCon 2013 in Portland

by Dan Linn, Front-End Architect / Fun Master

I'm very excited to announce that papers are now being accepted for DrupalCon 2013 in Portland! I'm heading up the Site Building track this year and we have some very exciting things to talk about in both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 this year. Some of the main themes we'll be covering this year in Site Building will include using third-party modules to control the content layout of your site, modules that can add quick functionality with no configuration, and modules that can add very complex functionality without having to have the technical knowhow that would normally be required. If you like using Drupal but aren't looking to master PHP, this is the track for you. Read More…

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