Presentation slides for Drupal Camp Nashville "Intro to Theming" presentation

I am delivering a presentation at the March 14th Drupal Camp Nashville entitled "Introduction to Theming: Converting a static HTML + CSS site template into a drupal theme."

Here is a link to the slides from that presentation including relevant links - only slightly uglified by Google docs' translation of a keynote file into a cloud-based ppt file format:

https://docs.google.com/present/edit?id=0AXNi09WiGsTWZGNjM3Jxa3RfNTdmZnc0amtkeA&hl=en

If you have any questions or comments, please add below.

cheers,
Jon

I love you even more, Cufon!

Cufon is a fantastic way to embed fonts into your website, allowing you to not only move beyond the standard list of websafe fonts that we are all so incredibly bored with... but to present each and every font with crystal clear anti aliased edges. It's like embedding flash fonts in the page without the flash!

And now I just discovered that you can use the cufon framework to add gradients and shadows to the text as well. Amazing.


http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
using with drupal as a module: http://drupal.org/node/605132
leveraging the effects library with drupal: http://drupal.org/node/605132

Conflicts between Cufon module and WYWIWYG module for Drupal

WYSIWYG toolbar displaying correctly

So I was finishing up a site built on drupal - doing all the little clean up activities in order to flip the site live. I ended up needing to upgrade a couple of modules, adjust the caching, and just generally making a bunch of little tweaks. I was just preparing my email to the client to give them the low down on the new site, when I noticed that the WYSIWYG toolbar was not showing up in the node BODY for any content type. As I was just about to walk the client through the site and explain how wonderfully easy and intuitive it was going to be to administrate their site content, the sudden loss of a WYSIWIG environment right at the 11th hour was a bummer.

WYSIWYG toolbar disappears with CUFON module enabled

I had set the site up with the WYSIWYG api (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg) and the FCKEditor libraries (http://ckeditor.com/download). I really like the flexibility and power of this implementation, though it has taken me a while to get used to all of the myriad pieces and configurations... Such that you must install the module, then install a library, then configure the Input formats (admin/settings/filters) for the site (I always forget to enable the p and br
tags within the filtered HTML [admin/settings/filters/1/configure]), as well as configure the WYSIWG module settings (admin/settings/wysiwyg).

Anyway - Somehow someway I had introduced a conflict into my site which was preventing the WYSIWYG toolbar from showing up. I spent then next 3 hours tweaking setting, enabling and disabling modules, and just trying to get the WYSIWYG toolbar to show up. I reinstalled that module, switched libraries... no dice.

The culprit discovered in CUFON settings

Finally, I was able to deduce that if I disabled the cufon module (http://drupal.org/project/cufon) the toolbar would come back.  The thing is, the cufon module is totally awesome, and I was loathe to remove it from my site. So, I uninstalled and reinstalled and jumped though all of those hoops. I dug deep into all of the WYSIWG settings - and reinstalled that. Stranger still, I ended up looking at another site I had done and noticed that it was running the same versions fo WYSIWYG and CUFON and the same libraries - and that site was working!

Finally, right as I was about to give up, I went back and looked at the CUFON settings and noticed one selector field that had a font assigned to an empty selector. I set that font back to "-----" and... SUCCESS.

Anyway - hours out of my day on one stupid bit of carelessness. As my google searches in trying to rectify were totally fruitless, I hope this post may help people find a quicker solution to a small but frustrating problem.