On the Trail Blog

On the 7th, I celebrated the release of Drupal 7 in Jackson, MI, in the company of the Commerce Guys and a few other developers, designers, and drupalgangers. Rubbing elbows with fellow Drupal-lovers is always a good time, especially when you're celebrating something as exciting as the release of Drupal 7.

We recently completed the first round of major development on a new courseware publishing system for Open.Michigan, the University of Michigan's contribution to the Open Education initiative. In the spirit of open education, the system is freely available for download, modification and, use by anyone interested in contributing to the Open Education Resource (OER) community—the code will soon be available through github.com. 

As far as starter themes go, the AdaptiveTheme is both flexible, robust, and has dozens of options within the admin interface for changing the layout and other site features. It also comes Skinr-ready.

However, it was lacking one minor feature,  which is usually desirable in most designs. The sticky footer.

Steve and I recently sat down with Jon Zemke of Concentrate for a lively discussion about working and living in Ann Arbor. Check out the full article, Young & Entrepreneurial: A Q&A with Switchback, for our thoughts on some of the best food in town, the appeal of Drupal and Switchback, and how Ann Arbor can attract more young entrepreneurs.

Our fearless founders, Steve and Mike, will be contributing to a panel discussion on Thursday, August 26th, as part of Concentrate's Speaker Series. The focus is on young entrepreneurs in Michigan, and why they decided to start their companies in Ann Arbor.

Adding a custom region to any Drupal theme is fairly easy. For this example, I'm working within a Zen Ninesixty subtheme. I decided that instead of just using the right sidebar, I wanted to have a custom region inside the main content area so that the text would wrap around whatever I placed here. (By default, the main content area does not wrap around left or right sidebars.)