Hi Internet,

I know it's a bit late but better than never. Several Days ago I went to the Vancouver Drupal User Group March Meeting. I had a good time! My main objective of course was to network but I really learned quite a bit about how I can increase efficiency on my Drupal site deployment as well ways to reuse parts of older projects with some development tools.

The presentation topic was Reusable & Deployable Drupal Sites with Shawn Price. It was very informative and very technical. The bread and butter was all about how to do things well once, and only once. The techniques used Drush heavily and involved the Features Module and Install profiles. To avoid breaking the DRY rule he showed us the advantage of keeping a basic drupal installation profile as well as a set of features for any occasion.

I finally made my way out for the regular Surrey Drupal meetup. This month's topic presented by Katy Laan was the steps on how to take a Drupal theme from .PSD file all the way into a CSS Layout theme. A lot of designers/themers/skinners out there create the site page as a static XHTML document before incorporating it into a theme. This is a step I usually skip but I'd like to see if I can optimize my template code by writing it static first. A useful tool discussed is the starter theme in particular the Basic project. Smithmilner.com was actually created from the Basic theme. I'm looking forward to putting some of these tricks I learned into practise. Perhaps a smithmilner.com redesign is in order.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all music lovers all over the world! I hope you all got the pressie you wanted and had a long overdue family dinner!